Andrew Lam's Blog - Posts Tagged "internet"
Jammed Together in the New World, We Move to Cyberspace
"This was always my space," one yelled. "No man, it's my space now," the other one replied. A few young, well-dressed people walked by and giggled. "MySpace" as a phrase has a totally different connotation for those who go often online, for it evokes the posh virtual neighborhood where real estate is still plentiful and cheap.
But it is exactly the relationship between MySpace and my space that I have been thinking about of late, living here in downtown San Francisco.
For shrinking along with the size of an average American household, is the American dream of home ownership. Or rather, I should say house ownership. A condo is what most in the middle-class can hope for in a metropolis like San Francisco or New York. I suspect that in another generation or two, American middle-class living space in chic urban centers will look like that of Tokyo's today - which is to say, the size of a train compartment. That room of one's own, by then, is probably all one is going to get.
A few years ago The New York Times reported that 51 percent of adult women are without a spouse, and the percentage for men is not that far behind. In megacities like New York, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong, the birth rate is on the steep decline - having one child or more, after all, could mean sliding from the middle-class to the standard of living of the poor - a crib in the walk-in closet, garden on the fire escape.
That's why it's no surprise that tiny houses make big news. In Japan recently a small and narrow house was featured worldwide.
Known as micro-houses, according to US National Public Radio, "Architects have turned necessity into virtue, vying to design unorthodox and visually stunning houses on remarkably narrow pieces of land."
That trend is begining to take roots in the US. Jay Shafer has been making the news for spearheading luxury homes within the 400-500 square foot range, and he lives in one them, quite comfortably.
That the Japanese minimalist style has become the dominant style in the modern world is no fluke, the bonsai the precursor to the microchip, as it were. Bigger was once said to be better, but what's chic and ultra modern today - what's green and affordable - is smaller and streamlined.
The laptop takes no space at all, the iPod is the size of one's credit card, the stereo system that once occupied a generous portion of a living room now is so flat and ridiculously thin that you can hardly see it behind the rhododendrons, and the TV that once took too much space on top of the sideboard now hangs on the wall like a mirror.
While it's true for Americans that the average floor space in new homes is larger than 20 years ago, one has to factor in urban sprawl. I could have a sprawling house in the suburbs - Concord or Vallejo - I will have to give up my bedroom condo with the Bay Bridge and San Francisco downtown as my backdrop.
I know several people who spend up to four hours commuting a day, but the suburban homes they own come with a front yard and a garden in the back. Their children are reportedly happy, even if they rarely get to see their long-suffering, hard-working parents. There's always a catch: if you want more space you'll likely have to exchange it with your precious time.
Once I read about a young man who was arrested for stealing car batteries to power his high-tech equipment in San Francisco. He lives in a tent with a computer, and cell phone. He is not, he insists, homeless. After all, he has a home page and a full-time job. It's just that instead of spending his hard-earned money on rent, he prefers to construct a home for himself on the Internet where a cyberspace community knows him intimately.
There is, I think, bravery about this young man. He is imagining what he wants to get out of life and the classic Ozzie and Harriet version of the suburban house is no longer at its center. Like many members of my generation, he is giving the American Dream a radically new interpretation.
The problem is that for the first time in human history there are more people living in urban areas than rural, and cities have grown like amoeba into megacities - so crowded that they have become virtual countries with complex ecosystems unto themselves. Tokyo leads the pack with 31 million residents. Seoul has 23 million, followed by New York and Bombay. No wonder fewer adults are having children. Once a rural necessity, having children in an urban setting is no longer an inevitable part of marriage, nor is marriage an inevitable part of adulthood.
All over the world the rural poor leave open sky and rolling plains to flock to the edge of the metropolis - they crowd into ramshackle slums in the third world, or one-room units in the first - and the middle class is clinging to its precious status in the heart of cities by contending with far smaller living spaces than those of previous generations.
One morning on a very crowded bus, I counted 11 people within my immediate view, texting, talking on the cell phone, checking e-mail, listening to iPods. In other words, they were trying to keep the bus from being their only space, their only reality. And what was I doing? I recorded what I observed in my iPhone, of course, with one eye on real space and the other ogling the electronic mirror.
The Harris Poll reported recently that Americans 18 years and older spent an average of 13 hours a week online, excluding time spent checking e-mail. More are spending time on social networking sites than ever before. In 2050, nervous demographers tell us, there will be 9 billion of us. That's probably why so many of us now, feeling the onset of collective claustrophobia, spend an inordinately amount of our time logging in.
New America editor Andrew Lam is author of "East Eats West; Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His book of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost, is due out in March 2013.
I Tweet Therefore I am
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New America Media, News Analysis, Andrew Lam, Posted: Sep 02, 2012
A tragic and disturbing story from last week involved tweeting. A young woman who was being stalked tweeted her impending doom a few days before her murder. "So scared right now," and "I got me an uglyass stalker" were some of her tweets. Then, closer to her death, she tweeted, "This can't be happening..." In essence, she was broadcasting events leading to her demise.
In the same week, a teenager in a suburb of Baltimore posted murder-suicide references onFacebook before taking a shotgun to school and wounding one of his classmates on the first day of class.
Going back a month or so, there was another horrific story about a teenager who lost an arm to an alligator in Florida while swimming with his friends. He heroically fought the reptile and managed to get away, minus one limb. But the story didn’t seem fully realized without involving social media, and apparently the victim felt the same. According to ABC News, before going into surgery to close up his wound, he asked his friend "to snap a photo of him in the trauma unit and post it on Facebook."
The examples, of course, are endless. Yet they all seem to suggest that man's 21st century response to dramatic events is not necessarily just to simply interact with it, but to also record it. If communication technology was created to enhance our daily lives, something has dramatically shifted along the way: More and more, we are altering our behaviors in service of the digital world.
So many of us now have been raised on video games, cell phones and iPods. We’ve spent a large bulk of our lives in chat rooms, on Skype and posting videos to YouTube, to the extent that we’ve become news reporters and newsmakers, without even making much of an effort. We announce our actions and, in some cases, our impending demise online without giving it much thought. We have been so conditioned to invest our emotional life in the virtual space that it has become second nature. What’s more, many of us have learned to split our attention, with one eye on the electronic mirror and the other on reality.
Indeed, more and more, we are beginning to believe that we do not fully exist without some sort of electronic imprint in the virtual world, a digital projection of ourselves, a validation of our existence.
Pipiatum ergo sum? I tweet, therefore I am?
Wafaa Bilal, a photography professor at NYU, a couple years ago went a step further andimplanted a camera in the back of his head as part of an art project. The camera broadcast a live stream of images to a museum in Qatar. On his skull, the real and the digital converge, and the real is photographed for the benefit of the digital.
The trend is "self-tracking," according to the Economist, and a market for these devices is rapidly emerging. There are wireless devices that can track people's physical activities, while other devices can take measurements of brainwave activity at night, to chart users sleep patterns online.
"People around the world are now learning how to leverage the incredible power inherent in the URL to create what is essentially a parallel universe of digital identities," noted Robert Young, an Internet entrepreneur. But in this new industry, he observed, "the raw materials for the 'products' are the people... the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of 'cultural products.'”
Perhaps it's too early to tell the long-term effects of an oversaturated information age on human evolution. But according to the New York Times, "Scientists say the constant use of computers and cellular telephones is causing a significant, evolutionary shift in our brain's wiring."
But one of the most troubling consequences of devoting so much attention to the virtual world is the death of empathy. Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, told the New York Times that empathy is essential to the human condition. However, given the virtualization of the real world, and tendency for many to multitask, "we are at an inflection point," he said. "A significant fraction of people's experiences are now fragmented."
Which may very well explain a story that involves professor Bill Nye, popularly known as "the Science Guy" on TV a couple years ago. He collapsed on stage out of exhaustion as he prepared to give a lecture. But instead of rushing to the stage to help him, the LA Times and other media reported, many students in the audience took out their cell phones, snapped photos, texted andtweeted the event.
Or consider this now famous story involving YouTube. On March 30, 2008, a group of teenagers in Florida lured one of their own peers to one of the girl's homes and videotaped her beating. With one girl behind the camera to record the episode, and two boys guarding the door, the rest mercilessly beat the young woman into a concussion. It was for a dual purpose: to "punish" the victim for allegedly "trash talking" about them on MySpace, and to post the footage on YouTube. The most telling line during the beating, however, was when the young woman behind the camera yelled out: "There's only 17 seconds left. Make it good."
Seventeen seconds left, that is, in a 10-minute slot - the maximum time one can post a video segment on YouTube. The time frame and the incident prompted a journalist to quip, "Well, Warhol was only off by five minutes."
10-Minutes of Fame
What makes that incident unusual is not the violent act itself - girl fights have been well reported, after all - but that the girls' actions were dictated not by a pure act of revenge but by a kind of exhibitionism rarely seen before. Stranger still is that, increasingly, the electronic world dictates exactly how an action should be carried out. The collective beating of the young woman, for instance, was directed to intensify as the video neared its 10 minute mark. (Did their beating lose steam, one wonders, when the camera stopped rolling?)
This modern mindset has given psychologists and anthropologists enough material to study what they call the "disinhibitive effect" on the Internet. Road Rage is quickly giving way to Net Wrath. Like actors who are trained to lose their reservations on stage, many now take daring risks for the virtual world - nevermind that they might have repercussions in the real one. They show it all, or do something enormously bizarre or violent, to garner lots of hits, lots of eyeballs.
Andy Warhol may have been off by five minutes, but he was otherwise frighteningly prophetic. A future in which everyone can be famous for about 10 minutes has indeed arrived. We have all become actors, filmmakers and reporters. We begin to believe that we are not fully ourselves, that we are not viable in the new system, unless we make some sort of electronic imprint, some sort of projection of ourselves, in the virtual world. Diaries, once locked away and hidden, have now gone electronic in the form of blogs and vlogs. The real event to some may no longer be as important as its virtual image, which can be relived online.
No one doubts that communication technology has enhanced humankind in marvelous ways. But it comes with a price. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was a seminal work and a warning that the discovery of electricity could create a monster at the cusp of the industrial revolution, and that punishments awaited those who dared steal powers from the Gods. The Wachowski brothers' extraordinary movie The Matrix, made at the end of the 20th century, in which humans are enslaved and permanently trapped in a simulated reality, was in a way the same warning. Man in the 21st century has transcended geographical and even biological constraints, and found the power to translate himself in various media across the globe. But as a result he is seriously fragmented.
The hero in this new myth necessarily needs to become a prophet. For his is the arduous task of reintegrating the various fragments of the self, hearing the symphony in the cacophony, seeing the human in the digital -- or else, man will suffer being trapped forever, in the halls of mirrors.
Andrew Lam is an Editor at New America Media and the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His book of short stories, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
From Arab Spring to Autumn Rage: The Dark Power of Social Media
“Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does,” the magazine noted. “Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state.”
Assange, founder of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, on the other hand, undermined entire nation states’ public narratives of themselves by providing a platform where individuals can anonymously whistle blow and show their government’s dark underbellies by uploading top secret documents. Spy agencies can only look on with envy and alarm.
In 2011, a fruit vendor made the cut. Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian who set himself on ablaze protesting police corruption, became literally the torch that lit the Arab Spring revolution that spread quickly throughout the Middle East. Bouazizi achieved this in his very public death because many who had cell phones saw it and the subsequent videos kick-started the uprising. The revolution took all governments by surprise.
Convicted Filmmaker’s Many Aliases
This year no doubt Time can add “Nakoula Basseley Nakoula,” aka “Sam Bacile,” as a major contender. An unknown amateur filmmaker until this week, fanned the flames in the Middle East with incendiary video clips. In effect, the film mocked and insulted the prophet Mohammed and turned the whole Arab Spring of 2011 into Autumn Rage of 2012 Against the USA.
Nakoula/Bacile is currently in hiding and may in fact be fictitious. Much evidence now points to him as a Egyptian Coptic Christian, who allegedly holds grudges against Islam. On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Nakoula was convicted two years ago on federal charges of financial fraud.
The jury is out on who instigated the violence against U.S. workers in Libya, resulting in the death of the American ambassador and three other personnel. The attack was carefully planned, it was reported, and not the mere work of angry protesters – but few doubt that the film has a direct effect in stoking a combustible anger in the Middle East against what many consider as yet another American act of profanity against the sacred.
In the global age, it seems that not only dictators or overzealous elected heads of state with power of preemptive strikes can direct history to the edge of an abyss, but also fruit vendors and lousy filmmakers.
If Zuckerberg is a kind of head of state of the third largest country and Julian Assange has become the equivalent of a CIA institution gone rogue, then Bouazizi, a private individual, has become the modern equivalent Joan of Arc.
Soon, too, the director of Innocence of Muslim, whoever he is, will become a kind of knuckle headed hater, who nevertheless emerged with the extraordinary power to incite violence against America. That would make Al-Qaeda, by comparison, seem tongue-tied.
For all its planning, for all its propaganda and brainwashing of the illiterate and easily duped to blow themselves up – merely to garner dwindling media attention in the West --Al-Qaeda hasn’t achieved what an inane video has. The film and its 13-minute YouTube trailer quickly undermined much of the United States’ soft diplomacy in a region it considers of utmost important.
In a blog for the Boston Globe, a friend of slain Ambassador Chris Stevens shared her shock with this headline: “How Could Chris Stevens Die Because of a YouTube clip?” Alas, the answer is: Why not? In our information age, the break up of a virtual friendship can lead to suicide, and misinformation can create a real lynch mob, half a world away.
A Digital Parallel Universe
A while back, Robert Young, an Internet entrepreneur, noted, “People around the world are now learning how to leverage the incredible power inherent in the URL to create what is essentially a parallel universe of digital identities."
What he didn’t predict is that people do not only leverage URL power for self-promotion or product sales, but to change the outcome of world history. While governments worry about sophisticated cyber terrorism, a virtual town square is now available to any second-rate hater willing to desecrate what others consider sacred in order to push the buttons that might lead to mass protest.
It is important to note that within the 24-hour period after Ambassador Stevens and his staff occurred in Libya, Apple came out with its iPhone 5 version. “Larger, meaner, faster” is how one reporter at the convention described it. In the same news cycle, CNN published article with this headline, “How Smartphones, Tablets Make Us Superhuman.”
The article cites Michael Saylor, author of the new book, The Mobile Wave and CEO of MicroStrategy.
“The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years to run its course. The Industrial Revolution required a few centuries. The Information Revolution, propelled by mobile technology will likely reshape our world on the order of decades,” notes Saylor. “But despite the turbulence ahead, we live at one of the greatest times in history. Software will suffuse the planet, filling in every niche, and exciting opportunities will lie everywhere.”
And so are the risk factors as the magic wand of history is bestowing incredible power to private citizens, to fruit vendors and hateful amateur filmmakers.
Through the digital world people can attain real power to speak beyond their own geographical constrains. Erstwhile, unknown singers and performers can become famous practically overnight with a well-placed YouTube video. And haters can pinch the right nerve endings at the most vulnerable time so American missions anywhere at distant place can go up in flames.
Nation states are being stunned by the swiftness with which social media can change the outcome of world events. Excited copycats are waiting in the wing. Why not make a false video showing Japanese killing Chinese on Dao Yu island? Why not show blurry videos of Pakistani soldiers raping Hindu women in Kashmir? The list is endless.
Of course, there is only fairness in the law of exchange. Assange is now in virtual house arrest in London, living in a tiny space in Ecuador’s embassy, as he is a wanted man in the United States and elsewhere. Bouazizi is, of course, dead.
And this moronic filmmaker, whose identity is yet to be fully determined, is now in hiding, perhaps for good. Lawsuits and arrest may follow, death threats are only to be expected. He will learn soon enough: There’s a price to pay if you incite in these global days.
Still, this amateur with a camera crew and a group of funders has made his point. No longer do heads of states and sophisticated terrorist organizations have the monopoly of power to press those dangerous buttons. Those buttons are available now for those who want to spend $199 or, for swifter downloads and uploads, $399 for the 64 GB version of the latest iPhone.
New America Media editor, Andrew Lam, is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" and "East Eats West: Writing in two Hemispheres." His book of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost, is due out in 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
