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.

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.

TED

TED.com is much too good to keep a secret. If you’ve not come across it before you have a cornucopia in front of you waiting to discovered and explored. TED.com is website full of mind changing lectures, videoed at TED conferences around the world, in which experts and sages talk about Technology, Education and Design.

There is a TED app for the iPhone too, which means I often start the day with a quick lecture in bed with my cup of tea before I get going.

I’d like to share the lecture I watched this morning by Devdutt Pattanaik, called East vs. West — the myths that mystify. Devdutt is an engaging speaker who very simply explains the difference between western and Indian views of life and why the west finds it hard to understand. (I get the feeling that the east understands the west only too well!)

Here is a master storyteller at work, proving what I always believe, that no amount of preaching is as effective as a simple story well told.

Roughs and Plans – Rubbish or Gold Dust?

I became an author in a haphazard way. I was an illustrator first, but was encouraged to write by my editors. It was a hit or miss process. I never wanted to question it incase I broke whatever it was that I’d got working.

Then came the National Literacy Strategy and people started to ask me awkward questions. “What does your story plan look like?” was the hardest one. I asked other authors what theirs looked like. They smiled and stared back at me with blank expressions. None of us knew what a story plan was or what it was supposed to look like!

Of course we all planned in our own ways. I don’t suppose any of us had been given formal story planning training, so we had developed our own systems. Mine was to keep writing and rewriting until the finished thing looked a bit like my original idea. Initially I poo-poohed the whole idea of planning, but as time went on, I discovered I was being asked to address myself to the issue, particularly for dyslexics and boys who were struggling with their writing.

It began to dawn on me that this group might be like me, more visually-minded, more right-brained. I started to looked into it a bit deeper. It was Anne Marley, the wonderful Head of Hampshire’s Children’s, Youth and Schools Library Service, who put me onto a book about mind-mapping by Tony Buzan. It quite blew me away. I realised I’d been doing something similar anyway, so I adapted Tony Buzans’ ideas for my needs. Then I became a bit right-brainist for a while!

Then, with more reading about discoveries in neuroscience, I realised the secret is to use both sides of the brain. The right is great for seeking patterns and creating plots. The left is best at sequencing the plots and turning it into language.

My story plans now come in two distinct phases, right-brain, radial thinking plans and left-brain, sequenced, linear plans with a beginning, middle and end. My sketchbooks are full of these plans.

Last week I was showing all my plans and plots and character sketches to the year five children at Whitchurch School. I’m currently working on a project with them.

Afterwards, Mrs Stevens, their teacher, said to me, “We do plans, and do you know what we do with them when they are finished?” I waited for the answer. “We put them in the bin!” Loud intake of breath from me! What does this say? It says that plans and plots are rubbish – so why bother in the first place.

This was a real eye-opening moment for both of us. We’ve got some lovely sketchbooks for the children to do their projects in now. I’ll be getting them started tomorrow. It will be fascinating to see how we get on now that all their planning, research and early drafts will all be in one book, a handy reference for the finished pieces of work we will be aiming towards. Oh yes? Did I mention, I’m not expecting them to write masterpieces in forty five minutes?

Colouring-In Worksheets

We didn’t have photocopies to colour-in when I was a lad. The teacher would draw diagrams on the blackboard and we would copy them or we would trace maps from books and draw them in or exercise books. Some smart kids had plastic templates in the shape of Great Britain and several other useful countries. I remember drawing around them when they lent them to me and I remember tracing the shape of the UK on hard toilet paper and rubbing it down onto the alternate blank pages of my geography exercise book – alternate lined and blank, that is.

Miss Sherbourne used to make amazing multicolour chalk drawings on the blackboard that we would copy. We would try and keep the drawing un-erased for as long as possible – maths lessons would be written around the drawings of red squirrels.

The act of drawing the outline so many times has built neural pathways in my brain such that I can do a pretty good map from memory, freehand. If you have only ever coloured-in worksheets and have never drawn the map from scratch, you will never be able to do this.

The act of drawing creates neural pathways along which extra data about the subject is scattered, so, as you draw the map, you recall where the towns are and the names of the rivers. The act of drawing reinforces the lesson learned and helps to recall the information later. Remember – a picture tells a thousand words. Then why do we not teach drawing and include it as a major part of literacy? Why spend so much time analysing a piece of text that can be explained in a simple drawing? Why, when literacy has been top of the list of education, has the major language of literacy, i.e. drawing, been downgraded or even abandoned?

Photocopiers and worksheets are at the root of the problem. If you don’t like drawing or, have been told you are rubbish at drawing at Education College, it is so much easier to find a worksheet, photocopy it out and get the kids to colour it in. Colouring in makes it pretty. It does not create neural pathways.

Now the blackboard has gone – replaced with the smart board. The board may be smart, but is is smart to use it? There should still be a white or blackboard alongside – as large and as prominent.

Colouring-in is a past time. If you want to learn – don’t color-in anything you have not drawn yourself.

Bling My Coach

Please vote for the Pink Car Rally coach to win the bling my coach competition by voting for them here
The Pink Car Rally is in aid of a fledgling children’s charity, called the Little Princess Trust, which provides children who have lost their hair (primarily through cancer treatments) with ‘real hair’ wigs. If we win this competition, we can take 49 pink passengers on the coach and if each one raised an average of £50 Sponsorship, we could raise in the region of £2500 for the charity!! How fantastic would that be? It means that the charity could provide wigs for 8 more children!! We NEED to win!! Please help us…..

Please look at the short film, which is introduced by Gail Porter, on the Little Princess Trust’s website (www.littleprincesses.org.uk) It tells the story of how the charity helped Melissa….

Time Travel, Quantum Physics and Writing Stories

My dear son, Ed, came with us to see the Time Traveller’s Wife, last night. Afterwards, he had quite a lot to say about the practicalities of time travel and the way it was represented in the film.

Everything he said was right, but then everything he said was wrong. He was only prepared to discuss time travel from the Quantum Mechanics point of view, eventually admitting that Quantum Mechanics is the best explanation of how things work that we have at the moment.

But once, Newtonian Physics was the best explanation and before that Hobgoblins and the Philosopher’s Stone. In their times each theory was the best to hand and therefore, “The Truth.”

Quantum Mechanics only works at quantum levels. In our everyday macro mode, Newtonian Physics still makes the most sense to people who need to keep their feet on the ground. These are models of our Universe, but there are many more. To make the models work, you have to believe in them. At the same time you have to suspend belief in what you can see and feel and touch around you to be able to get a handle on the amazing idea that is Quantum Mechanics.

If we disbelieve the story of Quantum Mechanics, (it does have holes in the plot) then we have to believe something else is at work. That is the wonderful, bonkers nature of humanity – it is just as easy to believe in fairies as it is to believe in gravity being both a wave and a particle at the same time.

One of the possible outcomes of Quantum Theory is the Multiverse, where each and every possible version of history is played out at the same time in an infinite number of “slices”.

Isn’t that how a story works? When a writer sits down to write a story, the plot can go in a million different ways. Different characters and situations exert their own gravity on the plot, pulling it and distorting it every which way. The writer guides us through their best interpretation of the story. The slice that tells the most satisfying version of the story.

They say there are only seven stories. Maybe there are only seven Multiverses and writers merely show us different slices. Each slice a different possibility in time and space for that particular story Multiverse?

When we hear or read a story, we suspend belief and go along with what we are told for the duration of the tale. Sometimes the story makes perfect sense and the story becomes ubiquitous, rewritten and retold over and over again. Sometimes the story doesn’t work – it sits on the shelf where no one reads it – a slice of multiverse that went wrong. It doesn’t mean that another author can’t take the same plot and fashion a more interesting or meaningful version of the same story – show us a different, more satisfying slice of that Multiverse. It happens all the time. Remember – there are only seven stories.

So however much you may argue about the realities of the time travel plot in the Time Traveller’s Wife, The plot works perfectly in this slice of time and space or should I say my slice of time and space? Quantum Physics has a lot to say about the how and by whom events are observed.

Something about the plot is right because it has resonated with the millions who have read the book and seen the film. For those millions, it stands as a unified theory, one they seem to accept and understand for the moment.

Sketchbooks

What a wonderful thing is a sketchbook. I sat down at my desk this morning with a blank sketch page ready and open on my desk to start my next big project. First, I wanted to go back to my original inspiration. I was delayed at Bristol Airport, it must have been spring 2006, when an idea sprung into my mind.

I got my little sketchbook out and began to work out the idea. It was probably the coming together of lots of ideas, but at that moment, all the pieces fitted together. I’ve found the original page and here is a picture of it. I think I had recently got into mind-mapping, and this is a great example of how I’ve adapted Mind Maps
for my own use.

My sketchbooks are full of little diagrams like these. What is so great about sketchbooks is that you can see ideas evolving and better still how one improves over time. I’ve skimmed through five or six year’s worth of sketchbooks this morning. I found one tiny, throw away sketch for a couple of characters that must have popped into my head three years ago. I’ve never thought about them again. I looked at the sketch in amazement. Did I draw that? Is that my idea? It’s brilliant. I’ve redrawn it in my current sketchbook to reinforce the idea and keep it up to date. If I wasn’t ready or capable to work on those characters then, I am now, both technically and emotionally.

Another surprise was my handwriting. This had got progressively worse over the years. I made all sorts of excuses for it. In the last three years I’ve been working on it. I can’t believe how bad it was and how much better it has got. The secret? I’ve slowed down and every now and then I do exercises. When I write something badly, I analyse the letterflow and see what I’m doing wrong and revise the cursive joins of the letters, then see if those revisions work with other words. One or two lettershapes I have changes completely.

I’m also surprised how much scribbled writing there is in my old sketchbooks. Something must have happened about three or four years ago, because they start to fill up with drawings and mind map diagrams and the scribble writing, which used to fill up most of my sketchbooks, fades out. It was probably the mind maps that did it. I can put that down to Anne Marley, the wonderful Children’s Librarian from Winchester. I was telling her my suspicions about left and right brain learning one night, and how I thought right brain thinkers are positively discriminated against in the education system. The next day she gave me a piece of paper on which was written Tony Buzan’s name and the title of a book on Mind-Mapping
. The book quite blew me away. Since then, my organising, plotting and planning has been much more structured and understandable. Previously, I scrawled down whatever came into my head, with unreadable writing. It was more catharsis than organisation.

I’m amazed also at how my drawing has improved over that time, especially since most of that time my illustrations have been done on the computer. Maybe the way I work on the computer has changed the way I think about drawing?

Still it’s good to know that I’m still going forward and haven’t stopped learning. Now, down to the real work.

The sinister left hand

I disturbed a hornet’s nest yesterday. I gave a talk over the weekend about creative organisation and was explaining how the left and right sides of the brain work differently. The left side deals in order and language. The right side is a bit airy-fairy and deals with the world in a wider, looser way. The right side takes everything in, decides what is important and then passes it over for the left side to organise and make sense. That is a very crude description.

One of my audience had had a couple of small strokes and wondered how that might affect their creativity. They told me there were some words that they just could not remember. This led into a discussion about left and right-handedness. Counter-intuitively, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa. We then wondered if right-brained thinkers might be more left-handed than the norm.

Yesterday I asked my FaceBook friends how many were left-handed, as most of my FaceBook friends are writers or illustrators. There was no statistical anomally in the results – If I’d thought about it more I would have known that.

However, I was not ready for the tirade of abuse that came back about left-handed people! My friends are intelligent writers and thinkers, so I assume that they were being mostly ironical, but a base hatred of all things left-handed was very evident.

My sister is left-handed, so I grew up with it as an everyday occurrence and learned all about her difficulties with scissors and clothes’ irons and other tools that are made for right-handers. I read on one forum yesterday, how someone said they hated sitting next to left-handers because their writing arms bumped into each other. The obvious answer is to change places! I remember fondly sitting next to a left-hander, who was the object of my affections when I was about six. We both had long pencils with walking stick ends – they looked like candy canes – the hooks entwined as we wrote. I was most upset when the teacher made us swap places. I suppose I was always a romantic.

Yesterday I was reminded that the word sinister comes directly from the latin word for left and that left-handers were often considered to be witches. One of my friends, assuming I was left-handed for asking the question, wondered why it hadn’t been beaten out of me at an early age! I guess this must happen. I found a few forums with concerned mothers asking how to make their left-handed children right-handed. In the past, left-handers had their arms tied up behind their backs to force them to use their right arms. My Grandmother had a little board tied around her neck to let everyone know that she was a Welsh speaker in the times when they tried to beat the language out of children and make them speak English. It’s the same thing.

You would think by now that we understand everything about human nature and have become more accepting, but it seems we are hard-wired to go along with the norm. Anything that deviates is deviant – obvious. I won’t mention that I grew up with bright red hair – lucky for me it turned very dark as I got older.

Alright, I will mention it as I’m frequently shocked at the way “Gingers” are abused on the TV and in the press. It doesn’t seem to happen in other countries. Americans are amazed at the way we treat ginger hair. I think it’s a race memory hatred of the Vikings. Red-heads are the only people you can legally be nasty to nowadays. When the UK had it’s enormous influx of immigrants in the 60s and 70s red-heads were forgotten and had a quiet time as we told jokes about, and were generally hostile to, the Pakistanis, West Indians and the Irish. But now it’s against the law to tell those jokes or show any animosity to other races, so tough luck on Gingers – they are fair game again – and, so it would seem, are the sinister ones amongst us.