I love it when a plan comes together!

I’ve been telling a story about this little girl in schools and libraries for about ten years now. The story has changed and evolved in that time. I thought I had it cracked when I rewrote it around a pop-up gimmick I invented. But the banks crashed, the recession hit and it proved too expensive. I’ve been thinking about how to rewrite it ever since. I had one major rewrite, but it didn’t work at all.

It’s amazing the way the subconscious works. Last night I had an email from the editor I was working with at the time, Natscha Biebow, with a lovely picture of her son on his first birthday. She was writing to say she wouldn’t be returning to work.

I suppose, subconsciously, I’d been awaiting her return to get on with the story. Her email must have loosened something in the brain, because I woke at 5.30 with the answer. It was so simple I can’t think why it’s taken me ten years or more to think of it!

Am I going to tell you the secret? Of course not! Unless you are a picture book editor and would like to have a little look!

Maybe the internet is alive already?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet since about 1977, when I first realised what computers could do and that they could talk to each other. I used to tell people that one day that we would all have computers and that they would be connected by the phone and that one day the final connection would be made that would turn the mass of computers into one brain.

Of course everyone said I was mad! Many people, technologists mostly, believe that this is likely in some way.

Thinking about the idea of the Web, this morning, I wonder if it hasn’t come alive already. I always assumed it would be a thinking, reasoning brain. What if it is just plain stupid or just not very intelligent?

Like a spider… sitting in the middle of a web, catching anything it can, sucking the juice out and doing nothing other than surviving to do the same the next day.

Isn’t that what the web is doing – sucking the juice out of what it is that makes us humans? Anything original that is posted on the web is immediately homogenised, made to fit into standards, broken up into bits, re-mashed, churned up and made to look like something new, which it isn’t. We come to expect standards.

A couple of years ago it was fashionable to talk about nano technology leading us into a world of grey goo. Well, isn’t that where we are heading on the internet? A world of grey digital goo, where everything is so chopped up and interlinked that it becomes meaningless.

A couple of days ago I posted an article about eBooks and authors. This was then posted up on a meaningless site called astonmartinnews.com. This site seems to have no reason to exist, other than to post links to other sites in the hope you will be drawn to it and then click on the advertising.

The page says that my blog entry has been tweeted about three times from that page! There are three comments on the article each linking to adverts to sell you ebooks. The whole confection has been whipped up by computers and there has not been one human interchange in the whole affair. What the hell is it about? All that Human ingenuity put to work for absolutely nothing. And this is going on all over the web every single microsecond. As more and more spurious links are made by mindless machines, the whole net becomes a mess, the real stuff gets harder to find so we fall back on the homogenised wisdom of Wikipedia, a wonderful encyclopaedia of pop culture.

When did you last get a really useful result from Google on the front page? The rest of the net is obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation, which basically means that you have to lie about the quality of your content to get to the front page so you can sell some ads. Real content is to be found on page 1245.

The net is a dead-eyed, care-less living monster that is slowly consuming our culture. Next it will begin sucking out the essence of our humanity.

The internet is probably the greatest tool we have ever invented – it may also be the worst.

Criticism – don’t take it lying down – Shoo Rayner Writing School

I’ve posted a vid on Youtube about criticism. I got two pieces of criticism on my drawing school site that made me think. One was not nice and one was brilliant. How can the bad one, (from someone who is obviously ignorant and thoughtless) be so crushing and the good one not quite make up for it? Here’s some advice for those who don’t pick up the pen for fear of being criticised.

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier – part 2

I’ve finished reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget,.

The positive ideas he said would be at the end of the book never really arrived. He has to split his mind in two to be able to start questioning, never mind get answers. He views art and humanity from a humanist viewpoint and technology from a computationalist viewpoint. The two views never meet as, I suspect, Newtonian Physics and Quantum Physics will never meet. Lanier has a vision of the future where we all become octopi on lsd.

It doesn’t excite me, I’m afraid. It’s hard enough being who you are, let alone pretending to be someone else in an online environment. He’s done a lot of work in Virtual Reality. He says that the brain soon responds to a new body and learns how to operate extra legs and make up for physical limitations.

I’m sure the brain would happily exist in cyberspace if it could, but what would that do to the concept of Humanity. The one thing that Lanier holds onto is the idea that Humans are special. We are not computers. We are something higher than that.

I can’t help but feel that the internet is changing that – smoothing down the individual, banging square pegs into round holes, making everything blend into gloop so that online culture becomes no greater than the giant, stupid, soap opera of Facebook or YouTube.

I’m beginning to think that the internet is a disease that has infected us. Did you see Avatar? That scene where the tree sends fungal-like filaments over the bodies as it scoops up the life force? I think that is what the internet is doing to us. Every time we connect another root is sunk into our brains, making it harder and harder to disconnect.

What would happen if you went offline? Can you? Your phone is now the internet. There are things you cannot do offline. How would you check train times, plot routes, find stuff out? Libraries are getting rid of non-fiction, because no one uses it anymore.

If I disconnected would the world stop around me? How hard would it be? Would I be happier? Would I ever work again? How could I let everyone know how brilliant it was if I couldn’t blog about it?

We are so hooked and hooked-up we can’t stop. It’s worse than an addictive drug, there is no cold turkey other than becoming a monk in an isolated Tibetan monastery. It’s all around us in the airwaves. We cannot escape.

But we might, one day be disconnected – and then where would we be?

I am not a gadget, but I am beginning to feel like one. Someone or something is pulling the strings, making me write this load of nonsense. I could have gone out and done something useful instead – made a cup of coffee, fixed one of the many things in the house I’ve been ignoring for too long, but no – something is calling – needing text entry. I don’t think it is me feeling I have to do it – I have no idea who my reader is. I really do feel that I’m providing data for something bigger than me. Perhaps I should just be happy with that thought, but I’m not sure if that bigger thing is good or bad and whether I want to be associated with it.

I’m a children’s author, for goodness sake, I should be exploiting this blog to make people want to buy more of my books. Instead I’m making them think, “he’s a weirdo!” let’s buy someone else’s books instead, someone who knows how to play the game and appear soft and cuddly and non-threatning.

Perhaps the internet is not there to be questioned and thought about. Perhaps it really is just a communications device to be exploited for our own ends. Just an enormous advertising billboard onto which we can spray our bits of graffiti or slap up our posters saying, “Buy me now!” Then we can take the money and run off to a beautiful desert island and end our days in the sunshine.

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier

I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, at the moment.

Lanier is one of the original geeky gurus of the net. He’s taking stock and having a think about where we are going in this book, which he calls a manifesto. I haven’t got to the manifesto part yet, but his musings are most thought provoking.

I got in on the net quite early, building my first website in early 1997. Most people thought I was silly, self-indulgent or plain wasting my time. everybody told mw I was crazy when I told them they would all be emailing and video conferencing, shopping and banking online. “You won’t catch me doing that!” they all told me.

They were exciting times. If you weren’t there, you’ll never understand. The net was growing in dog years, the speed of change was incredible, keeping up with it was like being on drugs. Every day was a bright, new dawn as new possibilities opened up. I think my family worried about me for a while! I never did make a million – not many did – but the intellectual pursuit was worth it in itself.

But now it’s been corporatised. Just like the record companies collared the music industry, Facebook, Google et al have collared the net for their own ends. Does it matter? Maybe not now. These are pretty good guys – at the moment. But for how long?

Everyday Google and Facebook colonise our lives, not just affecting our society, they are becoming our society. We think we are the customers of these giant corporations, but we are not. We are the product. The advertisers are the customers! It takes a moment to get your head around that one. We do a deal with Facebook and Google – Give us these amazing tools and we will give you gigabits of high-level information about us and our lives, so that you can sell to us stuff we never knew we needed.

Lanier argues that we are becoming conditioned by the providers. We are being turned into homogenised purchasing units – infinitely targetable by the advertisers. A good number of people now think Facebook is email – that is how they communicate.

Facebook is a boring, corporate, homogenised environment. It always looks the same and you are not in control. Remember last week how your front page changed? Did you have any say in that? Slowly, in tiny baby steps, they are grinding down their users so that they don’t notice innovations anymore and accept things into their lives that, if introduced in on fell swoop, would get them out on the streets protesting.

Facebook is there to make money for itself and for advertisers and for no other reason. The same with Google. They call themselves the good guys, but so did the Nazis. Google, in the hands of a dictator, could be the end of civilisation.

Lanier wants to celebrate humanity, and that is what we do not do in this brave new Web2.0. We homogenise and we anonymise. Yes, you can be who you like on the net, but what does that do to the real you? What does that do to real interaction between human beings. When you make a comment on the net and sign yourself, anonymous12547, what does that say about you? You are worthless and your comment is worthless, it may as well have been posted by a robot making up a stream of words that seem to make sense if read in the right order.

What happened to all those whacky personal websites? They all became corporatised. We are told what a website should look like and so they now all look the same.

I’m with Lanier, let’s bring a bit of humanity back to the web. It is a tool, not our god.

Double Speak

British Gas are advertising price cuts at the moment. A concerned voice says, “We understand how difficult things have been, so we are making things easier for you by cutting our prices.”

This is not quite true. What they mean is that the price of Gas has come dow to the point where they ca’t justify passing on the savings anymore. Do I want to change to British Gas – I don’t think so.

We had a leaflet through the door for Harry Tuffins, who are taking over the local Somerfield Store. The first hundred shoppers will receive a tin of Cadbury’s Roses for only £1.

Huh!? What they mean is the first hundred shoppers will have the opportunity of purchasing a tin of Roses for only £1 – that is quite different to what is suggested and actually shows a very mean spirit. Many of that 100 may well decide not to take up the offer and so less than 100 tins will be sold for £1.

It doesn’t make me want to pop in and see what they are like. I know already – tricky deals.

Day off

I’ve been so busy since Christmas, I’ve decided to do nothing today – and so far I’ve succeeded. I went to have a look at a really bad auction, just a load of old rubbish and now I’m going to slob out in front of the TV.

There comes a time when your brain needs a rest!

Up, Up And Away! A metaphor for life.

There are many metaphors that people use to inspire you to lead a better life. I quite liked this one because it makes sense and also, he’s not really selling a better lifestyle.

Bertrand Piccard travelled round the world in a balloon. He says ballooning is a beautiful metaphor for life. Go with the flow and be prepared to chuck out ballast to get to the right altitude – he means chuck out the baggage – fear and dogma… neat!

And if you don’t know about TED – you do now. Enjoy the wealth of video lectures and inspirational talks about Technology Education and Design.

Is Punctuation Important?

We had a very interesting discussion this morning. Is punctuation important. Beth, the teacher I’m working with at the moment, was frustrated by the way children expect to get maths and sport right, because there are defined goals and targets. There’s a right way and a wrong way to both score a goal and get a sum to add up.

But writing is different. I think there are a couple of reasons.

The first is because writing splits into two distinct phases – the creative ideas and planning stage followed by the sequential craft and graft stage. We are generally good at one or the other. None of us likes the punctuation bit.

I was looking at quite a bit of writing this morning. A few times I started to suggest adding or taking away punctuation then changed my mind as I heard the writer’s voice in my head and realised that I was making a style change rather than a comprehension change. It is this element of personal style that makes us loathe to criticise. This hesitation compounds itself to the point where we don’t like to point out anything that needs changing, however glaring the mistake.

If your computer programming teacher suggests you should change a comma to a semi colon, you would do it without argument. Programming languages are very precise. One wrong instruction (or piece of punctuation) and, at the best, the program stops working – at worst, it crashes and you lose a week’s worth of work!

Why should writing stories be any different. The pattern and order of words should be laid out in a particular way that the reader can interpret the intention of the writer. A piece of writing is just a storytelling program. Stray from the protocols and the reader interprets the text differently to the writer’s intention.

Maybe children don’t know why they are writing at school. Who is their audience? Notes can be written any old how – they are not for publication and we presume the writer will be able to read them back. (Although this is frequently not the case!)

Any other writing must surely be done consciously for an audience, with punctuation in the right place. Style can be argued over later.

The reader needs the correct program instructions, otherwise the writing does not make sense and their brain crashes and stalls, fed up and frustrated.

You can be the most graceful and powerful footballer in the world, but if you don’t aim at the goal, you’re not in the team.

P.S. I’m not perfect, so please don’t nag me about my punctuation. I like to think I have my own style!

CAPTOLOGY – Word Of The Day – build your word power

Woah! I came across this quite by accident. Captology is the study of the use of computer technology to change people’s attitudes or behaviours. Scary!

Find out more here.

Learn a new word every day.
Repeat it and remind yourself what it means at least three times in a day.
Try to use the word in conversation or writing today.
Get a dictionary and look words up.