Category: culture

In and Out

I’ve taken a hiatus from programming work the last few months in order to do some other things, both paying and non-paying. I did some teaching, spent a lot of time at the bicycle co-op, published some articles in a local periodical, and started a few side projects. It has felt very gratifying and healthy.

My erratic life nowadays makes me think back to the starry-eyed aspirations to be a professional programmer that I had, say, ten years ago. I have a much more casual relationship to computers these days. Gone is the anxiety of having to prove, both to myself and to the world (including employers), that I am skilled and capable. I don’t care much anymore for the company of obsessive coders who enjoy religious debates about languages, tools, and best practices. They don’t seem to realize that in their pursuit of mastery and professionalism, technology is actually controlling them, and not the other way around.

Technology has become truly “technical” for me, in the fundamental sense of being a means to an end. I’ve been writing and tweaking Javascript and PHP recently. I don’t like them much, but they are decent tools for the specific tasks I am trying to accomplish. And so it goes. Getting back into code has been a Zen-like experience: when I am doing it, I am fully engaged in all the particularities. But when I’m finished with it, that’s it. Programming, and software more generally, is instrumental. I dive into it; then I come out. And there is nothing more to it than that.

It is silly to fetishize a hammer when you should be focusing on building the house, but that’s exactly what a lot of the culture of coding often feels like on blogs, message forums, mailing lists, conference agendas, etc. How silly and ridiculous. One should, of course, be thoughtful about tools, when and how to best use them, and how they can be improved. I do appreciate and value that. But at the end of the day, code is simply code. There is just so much more to life. Remembering that helps us keep sight of the things that code is for in the first place.

FixedGearGallery Index 2.0

I created a new interface for my FixedGearGallery Index. What better way to procrastinate than spending a few hours on code?

The original purpose of the index was to provide an easy way to browse through the relevant pages of a particular make/model on FGG. My first version accomplished that goal, but it’s awfully clunky. After using it a while, I discovered how annoying it was to toggle between windows and keep track of where I was in the list.

The new version places navigation controls in a small area at the top of the page. It loads content from FGG into an iframe, eliminating the need for switching among windows. And the previous/next links allow you to browse sequentially, making it much easier to keep track of what you’ve already seen.

It’s not perfect but it’s definitely an improvement. I have fancier ideas for organizing FGG content but I don’t want to go too far by pirating Dennis’ site. I’m grateful he gave me permission to do the index at all when I emailed him about it a few months ago.

On The Death of Newspapers

The hot topic lately among the local blogs and news media is the death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as we know it. It’s looking likely that the organization will keep a small staff and move to a controversial online-only format that will include aggregation.

Back in January, Erica C. Barnett wrote some smart remarks on SLOG about how frustrating it is to repeatedly hear the same alarmist voices about the death of newspapers. That blog posting really struck a chord with me. Barnett makes a moderate prediction on how the whole “real journalists vs amateur bloggers” debate will eventually shake out. She seems to keep the focus, though, on questions of quality and professionalism. But I think what people don’t talk directly enough about are the particular interests that are inevitably at stake in different venues of reportage.

I was reminded of this again recently with this week’s On the Media program on NPR about how ethnic newspapers are thriving. That show really gets it right. It points out how the ethnic composition of society has been rapidly changing while mainstream newspapers have remained stubbornly focused on their target demographic of the suburban white middle-class.

The death of newspapers isn’t about the triumph of new media, no matter what people may say. When people argue that newspapers have been vital to democracy, I can’t help but laugh. When have mainstream newspapers ever been venues for populist voices or organs for the oppressed? In actuality, they’ve tended to be ideological proponents of middle class values and maintainers of the status quo.

No, what this is all about is the growth of new social classes: vital immigrant populations, younger generations who refuse the strict divisions of being either a consumer or producer, previously “fringe” groups eager for publishing/interactive venues to develop their own social and political interests and subcultures. It is these new social classes, and not simply the new publishing opportunities of the web (which, alone, are inert), that threaten the hegemony of traditional journalism. I think a lot more needs to be said about what kinds of stories and information the so-called “new media” as well as the alternative print press are producing in the age of the newspaper’s death. What new interests are we seeing at work in blogs? Who gets to have a voice now, and who is still left out? How is all of this redefining what counts as worthwhile or credible stories or events? These are the real questions of substance—with real implications for democracy—that will determine what the death of newspapers will ultimately mean.