Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ideas issue

Fascinating stuff in this week’s New York Times Magazine, their annual “Year in Ideas” issue:

• Musings on a collective way to mediate cellphone interruptions, and how best to signal an interruption. (“Consensual Iterruptions” - 12/11/05)

  Having solved the problem of when phone calls should interrupt us, Marti is now working on how they should do so. Inspired by the observation that the best interruptions are subtle and nonverbal but still somewhat public, he has designed an animatronic squirrel that perches on your shoulder and screens your calls. Instead of your phone ringing, the squirrel simply wakes and begins to blink.

• A surprisingly popular service from Virgin Mobile designed to help prevent “drinking and dialing.” (“Dialing Under the Influence” - 12/11/05)
• Is there something genetic about “the American character”? (“Hypomanic American, The” - 12/11/05)

  Even when times are hard, Whybrow points out, most people don’t leave their homelands. The 2 percent or so who do are a self-selecting group. What distinguishes them, he suggests, might be the genetic makeup of their dopamine-receptor system - the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking … This genetic makeup, Whybrow argues, may also be present to a high degree among the 98 percent of Americans who were either born in another country or into families that came to this country in the last three centuries. If the genetic marker cuts across immigrants of all origins, it’s not about where you come from, it’s that you came at all.

• And while we’re talking about American-ness, how about a distinctively “American” way that people from the United States smile? (“National Smiles” - 12/11/05)

  Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

• Newspaper disaster publishing in the wake of Rita and Katrina. (“Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper, The” - 12/11/05)
• “The crawl” at the bottom of cable news screens may actually impair comprehension of everything else going on onscreen. (“‘The Crawl’ Makes You Stupid” - 12/11/05)
• Create your own trend with CafePress. This article brought me back to my CCT days, particularly Tinkcom’s class… (“Mass-Produced Individuality” - 12/11/05)

  The mass-versus-custom balancing act is actually a very old thing. More than a hundred years ago, Mme. Demorest’s Emporium of Fashion in New York did a brisk business selling stylish dress patterns, allowing consumers to conform to the latest fashion but still requiring them to make the garment; even when 50,000 copies of one pattern sold, it was quite likely that no two dresses were exactly the same. The new version of mass customization does not seek to turn back the clock to that era: do-it-yourself publications like Make and ReadyMade have their constituencies, but most people who want, say, “unique” footwear do not actually want to learn how to manufacture a shoe. They want to pick out a color scheme on a sneaker made by a company with vast and sophisticated manufacturing capabilities. Alienation from the means of production is a selling point.

  CafePress plays to that sentiment, and to another: while it’s cool to make your own things with a few clicks and no particular knowledge of production details, it’s even cooler to sell those things to other people. True individuality is a little lonely, and conformity is easier to swallow if you’re an originator rather than a follower.