This is not: “You Try to Live on 500k in This Town,” a NY Times article that explains why Obama’s proposal will make life unlivable for the executives whose daily life is inexorably tied to wasteful extravagance. When you don’t follow your own advice and save some of your 1+ million dollar salary, it’s harder for me to take your mortgage seriously. Just the same, when your necessary annual expenses include paying your Tom Daschle-style chaffeur, it keeps America firmly on the revenge train. If extravagance is required by corporate culture, then the culture-change brought about by salary-caps or (better yet) progressive tax increases can be a good thing.
If I were still in college, and if I spent my time in college with a schedule that allowed for such awesome frivolity, then I would want to take a class that did in-depth (with some calculus!) analysis of StarCraft. Homework would never be so fun again…
There’s no surprise people are realizing and writing about the low-value of advanced degrees. Schools have used grad students as educational fodder, producing far more than the demand for academics can keep up with. People hoping for their PhD to be something beyond their pursuit of an intellectual interest unfortunately will continue to be disappointed when tenure remains forever out of reach.
Is it the fate of the internet to endlessly combine two words to make memes? Will these neologisms always make normal, everyday people throw up in their mouths, just a little? I recently discovered twiction, a combination of “twitter” (for the microblogging service) and “fiction” (as in fiction). Twiction, AKA twitter-fiction or (even worse) tweetfic, is fiction in a maximum of 140 characters, which usually translates to somewhere between 1 and 3 sentences. It’s been around for a couple of years and seems to fall somewhere between kinda popular and vaguely interesting. It comes in two forms:
First, the more common form, standalone microfiction: stories told in a sentence, usually feeling like something in between Ernest Hemingway’s famous “story in six words” experiment (For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn) and more traditional flash fiction. Given the inherent limitations of the Twitter service, writing Twiction is a sort of writer’s challenge—can you write a compelling story in a sentence? Can you fit a character, a conflict, and a resolution in a line? Or, in another view of what makes a story: can your character change from the beginning of such a story to the end, all in less than 25 words? The answer? Sometimes.
Any twitterer trying to write twiction comes across the problem that it is actually very difficult to produce a lot of super-short stories with distinct plots, characters, and resolutions. 140 characters isn’t a lot. What I’ve noticed in reading around is that one common crutch is to resort to melodramatic endings (“and he was never seen again” sort of stuff), like this piece from the now defunct twitterfiction:
The poison cut deep rivulets in her flesh, her blood caught fire and her heart slowed. Soon she would be dead.
Death is an easy resolution, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling or thoughtful piece. Who is she? Why is she being poisoned? It’s impossible to fit in everything, but all we have here is an ending—not a story.
Another common “mistake” is to paint a scene or a scenario, but not a real story. After all, it’s much easier to write a character sketch or a lyrical description of a forest in 140 characters than it is to write a complete story. An example from 3S Stories:
Karma can be a bitch. Ike wasn’t sure what he did to deserve being reincarnated as a function call in Vista, but it must have been horrible.
It’s funny, and I actually rather like this one, but there’s no motion. There’s nothing inherently displeasing about it (and new writers struggle with the same issue even with no artificial restrictions), but it does mean a sizable chunk of twiction is more like the creative writing of interesting sentences than true standalone stories. In some ways, twitter might be more suited for twitter poetry, where an image alone—well painted—can stand on its own.
A second type of tweetfic is the serial-story (two examples), a more conventional length piece written in 140-character installments (like the serialized novels in magazines that were common in the olden days). The biggest issue here is writing a story that moves along at a decent clip in small segments. Writing a bunch of entries back to back defeats the purpose entirely. Pacing becomes a problem because there is a tension between condensing action too much (boring) and not making any progress per entry (also boring). On top of that, it’s impossible to go back and alter tweets. The story must go on, no matter if you think you’ve made some serious mistakes in previous entries. A strong detailed outline probably couldn’t hurt. Still, word-choice and character-limits will never be as frustrating as in the first type—if something can’t fit, then move it to the next installment.
So what we have in twitter-fiction, I think, is a challenging medium that is almost at odds with the nature of Twitter (in the sense that Twitter users generally post frequently and have conversations with other Twitter users). At best, it’s a literary diversion in the blink of an eye with at least some degree of artistic merit. More often, just words. Though, after seeing the content of your average “tweet,” just words might be just fine.
It’s a joke, but a fantastic one: the Onion’s “World of World of Warcraft,” a veritable nerdgasm of meta gaming. Amusingly, I imagine this game would actually be more fun than Second Life.
I came across an interesting article by Henry Blodget, who attempts to reaffirm the original idea that Wikipedia is indeed a product of crowdsourcing, as opposed to obsessive work of a few hundred (or few thousand, it turns out) or so “fanatics, ” as Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has previously said.
The gist is that most of Wikipedia’s content is the result of countless individual additions—a paragraph here, a sentence there—often from users who never do anything else on the site. One imagines these contributions are few-of-a-kind labors of love. The vast majority of edits, however, are the result of the fanatics Wales refers to: people whose contributions take as much of their time as their jobs, doing things like spell-checking, linking to related articles, moving-things around, tidying the language, etc. So, Wikipedia is written by the many, edited by the few.
Of course, if you were to read the comments made on the first article (one of the quickest paths to depression you can find on the internet), Wikipedia also seems to inspire a special kind of vitriol. One flavor refers to the (lack of) quality of the content, the other to the supposed iron-fisted control by the top editors.
It’s true: errors abound on Wikipedia, as they will on just about everything. And, there are certainly examples of bias, corporate tampering, and pranks. That said, the quality is quite good on a incredible variety of subjects, much more than on a traditional encyclopedia. People complain that it’s not good enough to be cited on papers in high school and college. Well, I hope so. It’s an encyclopedia. Was Encarta? Britannica? Not in many classes I remember, and never by itself.
If I were to tell someone that in medical school, I’ve learned probably 75% of my knowledge for class from Wikipedia, some potential patients might be scared. Instead I’ll argue that when I need to know something in a pinch (or because the homebrew psuedo-textbooks my school provides are often terse and mystifying), Wikipedia is fast and almost always right. It’s often more clear than the textbooks I’ve used and offers interesting and useful information that’s not usually considered relevant enough to include in the already crowded curriculum. The internal links ensure that when there’s a term I’m not familiar with, I need look no further than a click away—saving me time and helping me cement my understanding. It’s not ideal or perfect, but it gets the job done. It’s a springboard and a resource, not the irrefutable source of all party trivia.
Perhaps a group of tight-fisted editors squelch useful new articles or reverse valid changes without warning or justification. Maybe it’s a sacrifice that is necessary in order to cut down on tripe and attempt to maintain a level of cross-article consistency. It’s understandable that someone who makes a one-time contribution gets snubbed and then gets angry, but it doesn’t negate the fact that I think the world is a better off post the wiki revolution than before. Mob wisdom might not be more than the sum of its parts, but it’s still useful.
It’s always a strange thing to start a site, especially the first post. It’s a bit of a quandary, how to strike a balance of tone and content, not to wax too self-important or with an excessive amount of false-modesty (because the truly, truly modest probably wouldn’t be publishing anything in the first place, really). Achieving such a balance seems a bit too troublesome, so I’ve come to terms with being tacky.
When I started publishing my thoughts online in college (in a different, now defunct Harvard-centric blog), it was for me a situation with unique but altogether easier to manage problems: It was exam period, and I had two history papers to write. I was ridiculously bitter, 1) because it was a very cold January in Cambridge, MA, and 2) because I had exams after a two-week winter break in December, whereas my peers from other colleges were still enjoying vacations at home. I started a blog to complain, and I did. That first post was already determined, spurned on by the desire to avoid real, required work. The hard parts, the subject and the motivation, were done for me. I lost both over time, and I updated less and less frequently until finally, I graduated. Both that chapter of my life and my discourse on the subject came to a natural and relatively fulfilling close.
Two hundred words later, and we get to the point. I’m feeling motivated again. There is no work to avoid yet and no theme to rely on, but those were, I think, crutches I need not rely on now. After one semester of medical school, I desperately miss the catharsis of a productive hobby (or two, or three). Reading textbooks and reading the news, even the Daily Show and Colbert Report, is not enough. So, with this new year, and at the dawn of a new semester, what better time than now to say: I will write. It will be a hobby, a release, a distraction from drudgery, and I will enjoy it.