Cold, wet, rainy, damp – blurgh!

It’s always the same after I’ve done a major splurge of School and Library visiting. I get back home with the best intentions of getting on with some writing or illustrating. But I seem to spend two or three days being unable to do anything creative.

There is all the business to sort out – the schedules to be revised and all those little internet things nagging away – the blog up dates, the website tweaks. I don’t know how a day goes by so quickly without seeming to have done anything.

I suppose I have fixed the light in the kitchen that was driving my wife mad. And I picked up my Mum from the dentist and went to the bank and stuff. And I recorded a new Drawing School Video which is uploading at the moment. And I’ve sent a few emails and answered questions from Yellow Group in Year Two from Peel Common Infants and now it’s suppertime. Hey ho!

Peace and Quiet

The Tree Surgeon is right outside my studio door. His chainsaw is screaming as it slices through the remains of my old Silver Birch.

And I realise that I’ve just done a good chunk of writing.

Having found a million other reasons not to get down and write in the past few days, the first proper reason, i.e. “I can’t think with all this noise!” has not stopped me at all.

Just goes to show – once you get going, nothing can stop you. It’s the getting going that is the hard part.

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.

Deep Voice

I’ve just had the most brilliant idea. Adrian Chiles used a “Love Mike” on the One Show tonight, to make his voice sound deep and sexy like Barry White. It didn’t sound very good, but the punters sent in romantic messages for him to read out.

Well, I thought, I can do Barry White impersonations and Darth Vader too! So, I’ve just registered www.deepvoice.co.uk on which I’m going to offer myself as a deep voice artist!

I think I should have an alter ego, The name Brute Torstein comes to mind! £6 for two years – surely I can turn a profit on that. This could be fun. I feel more butch and manly already!

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.

YouTube Tags – Where did they come from?

YouTube is a fascinating way of not doing any work, especially if you are promoting videos rather than watching them. I find I’m getting a little obsessed with my statistics on ShooRaynerDrawing, where I give drawing lessons.

It’s happened in the past with other sites. Back in the late nineties, when MP3 was just getting going and the ipod hadn’t been dreamed of, I started putting audio, music and stories, onto the much missed MP3.com. It was actually possible to make money from uploads in those days! I think I made about $40 – which I immediately spent back on the site in promotion. It might have been a bit of a scam but it was fun – quite like a sim city kind of game really, building your little empire on the net.

Since then, XML and tagging have come into being and the choice of tags is quite important if you want people to find you in all the noise. So I’ve been fine tuning my tags and watching to see if they have any effect, and they do. Getting your tags right does bring in more hits. These are not people randomly finding you, but you making sure that your video gets put in front of people who might be looking for it.

HOWEVER! This morning, while tweaking one set of tags, I noticed three tags that I would never have written myself – Visual Art Media – That’s just not in my vocabulary. It sounds American or academic. Or it sounds like the terms a professional tagger would use while summing up a site – standard tags.

SOMEONE has been adding tags to my videos on YouTube! It wasn’t me and I don’t have anyone working on the channel with me. I can’t imagine a hacker being so helpful, therefore it must have been someone at YouTube dropping in a few tags of their own to “help” me along!

Hmmm! Not sure how I feel about that.

Silver Surfers

I’ve spent the afternoon setting my mum up with her first laptop. She’s going to be Eighty Four tomorrow – a real silver surfer!

She’s got a Facebook account, knows how to get to times online and has just about got the hang of point and click. I guess there’ll be a lot of handholding for a while. Already she’s being bombarded with Facebook emails as my niece tags her in photos. Slowly, slowly does it – but all power to her for having the guts to embrace the internet at all.

Wait till I get her videoconferencing with her relations in Norway – There’ll be no stopping her.