McBain's Action Movie

Making the internet rounds this morning is a video some have called an Easter Egg from the early years of The Simpsons. Remember McBain, the Schwarzenegger caricature? Some have claimed that the short snippets of his movies depicted in the show--watched by various members of the Simpson family--are all part of a larger McBain action movie in which the hero hunts down a corrupt senator and avenges his partner's death.

Problem is, these scenes aren't portrayed in chronological order. For example, the closing scene of this purported action movie below is actually from McBain's second-ever appearance, in the season 2 episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" This changes this compilation from an extremely clever hidden in-joke told by multiple generations of The Simpsons writers to just a slick editing job by the fine folks at College Humor.

Video is still worth watching, though.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Reader's Despair Syndrome

Hello, my name is Avi, and I'm a readaholic.

I've always been something of an obsessive reader. I read my first Dave Barry column on January 1, 2000, as the comedy writer presented his summary of the millennium. I proceeded, throughout the course of my high school career, to read every single archived column available on any of the dozens of Dave Barry fan-sites I found. I think I was using AOL search, so I may have missed a few columns, but I did manage to uncover a few hundred pieces.

I repeated this general approach after reading Bill Simmons for the first time.

I still remember that fateful day--I was a senior in college--when I first discovered Google Reader. This is awesome, I thought. Google will deliver updates from any website I want? Awesome. What started off as four or five subscriptions soon ballooned to a dozen. I unsubscribed during those summers when computer access was limited, but resubscribed as soon as I returned to civilization. I currently sit at 36 subscriptions, and that's after pruning three in the last week. I don't read everything written on each of these sites. But I read everything from two dozen of them and I skim the rest. This, as I understand it, is a mild case.

At least according to Leon Neyfakh's article "Feed Me, I'm Hungry," published in The New York Observer:

Legions of jittery, media-conscious New Yorkers are eating themselves alive signing up for feeds they never end up reading  in hopes of becoming better people—more knowledgeable, more fun to talk to, more in control of their Internet consumption. They subscribe to dozens, sometimes hundreds of news sources, each of them added to the list with the best of intentions, motivated by the knowledge that, if they really wanted to—that is, if they had it in them to be disciplined and vigilantly curious—they could know everything there is to know. And so these poor balls of anxiety walk around with a constant awareness of all the hundreds of unread news stories, essays, reviews, and blog posts waiting for them on computers—all the marvels they're missing on Boing Boing and Kottke, all the Marginal Revolution posts, all the oil spill updates from The New York Times' U.S. news feed.

Call it Reader's Despair Syndrome, a condition that is afflicting New York's young and old with equal viciousness, but which tends to produce the most dramatic symptoms in people in their 20s and 30s, who retain hope that they will one day become more productive and virtuous in their Internet reading habits.

I've been thinking about these issues for a while, but it's always nice to both know that I'm not alone and to have these nebulous concepts articulated clearly. I'm not sure that this form of reading is good. Forget about whether RSS reading is healthy. I'm more concerned about what this does to me as a reader. Do I want to feel obligated to read the blogs that I love? Can I keep up with my reading without it feeling like an assignment in need of completion? 

Now, some of these subscriptions are for my blogging gig, so I don't really see a way to do without them. But I'm really curious about how I should treat my recently added subscriptions to The Paris Review Daily and Cardboard Gods. Would I enjoy these more if I visited these blogs only when I was in the mood to read them? I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions.

Are you a readaholic? How has RSS feeds changed the way you read?

This is your brain on Internet

Here's how I normally read things on the internet: several tabs, usually between four and eight, worth of Firefox are open, two of which--Gmail and Twitter--provide automatic updates when I receive an email, chat, or tweet. Music or a podcast is usually playing, controlled both via my MacBook's F7-F9 buttons and a series of virtual buttons located on the bottom of my Firefox window via an add-on called FoxyTunes. (If my iTunes is not active, this most likely means I'm sitting in front of a TV or watching Hulu or Netflix or whatever on my additional monitor.) I do most of my reading within Google Reader, where I can see the other dozens of unread posts and feeds waiting for me. In short, I'm rarely focused on reading one thing at any given time. And, of course, the content of the reading itself is different--hyperlinks mean that nothing is self-contained.

I'm not sure this a good thing.

Wired has just published an excerpt from Nicolas Carr's The Shallows, in which the author examines the effect of exactly this type of multitasking on the human brain. After detailing the requisite MRI scanning differences between regular internet users and infrequent internet users--suggesting that technology usage changes, in real and measurable ways, the very wiring of human brains--Carr says this:

Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics--evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats--that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension.

[snip]

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There's the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There's also the fact that numerous studies--including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases--show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. 

And most interesting of all:

When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain, says Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of the field of neuroplasticity. That means that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we're not at a computer. We're exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.

We're not looking for quality content so much as constant content. (From this perspective, it sorta makes sense why people don't want to pay for content on the internet.) I'm not sure how helpful it is to ask whether new realities of this type are good or bad, but shouldn't we try to pay attention to things? In addition to keeping these reading and comprehension muscles in shape for situations in which we really need them, I'd like to think, as someone whose writing is probably never read through any medium other than the internet, that people are doing more than just skimming.

Now, I'm not planning on changing the majority of my internet reading habits because a large portion of the reading I do is meant to be skimming. I skim/read probably more than one-hundred posts and articles per day for my blogging gigs, where I'm mostly just searching and sifting for good stuff to write about. But I am going to try to make an effort to pay attention to the internet writers who have earned my attention through their consistent excellence: the Joe Posnanskis, the Josh Wilkers, the Rob Walkers, the Ariels. Both because they deserve it and because I want to be present in the things that I do. Eat while you're eating, and all that.

(This is maybe the main benefit of printed books at this stage of history--the reading experience itself is different because the medium is more focused. Does that mean that only content of a high quality--content that deserves to be read, not skimmed--should be printed? Possibly. It's definitely something for traditional media companies to consider.)

But yeah, let's try to pay attention to what we're reading. Some of it, at least, is worthy of our attention.

Change the way you think

Some symbols just won't die. Open up your version of Microsoft Word and look at the button used to save your document: it's a floppy disk. This image used to make sense, because floppy disks were the dominant mode of computer storage for a twenty year stretch. But that floppy reign ended more than a decade ago. A significant percentage of today's computer users have probably never even seen a floppy disk. Yet there it is, the international symbol for saving a document.*

*Granted, it's not easy to come up with a replacement symbol. The floppy disk example demonstrates the folly of equating the save symbol with the physical object used to save information; things just move too quickly. Maybe a cloud, representing cloud computing, could work. But even this less-literal metaphor equates the method with the outcome. 

In a similar vein, New York's Vulture blog recently had some fun compiling a list of movie clichés that technology just can't kill, including my personal favorite, automatic windows:

Any time a character needs someone to roll down a window, they still make the crankety-crank motion, assumably because mime-pressing an imaginary automatic-window button is just way too hard to decipher.

But what if our entrenched ways of thinking limit the possibilities of our technology? Venkatesh Rao raised this question in terms of our connecting computer technology to the methods it has replaced:

Consider these terms: page, scroll, file, folder, trash can, bookmark, inbox, email, desktop, library, archive and index. They are all part of the document metaphor, a superset of the “desktop” metaphor. Some elements, such as scroll, desktop and library pre-date the printing press, but all are based on some sort of “marks on paper-like material” reference.

It is important to understand that the document metaphor is more than a UI metaphor. It is in fact a fundamental way of understanding one domain in terms of another. For better or worse, we continue to understand the web in relation to how we understand documents. Unlike figurative metaphors, such as “he was a lion in battle,” which are simple rhetorical statements, conceptual metaphors like document-ness are pre-linguistic, and quietly ubiquitous. They infiltrate how we think about things on a much more basic level.

Rao identifies several services that have overcome the document metaphor: "Google Wave is based on a flux metaphor. YouTube borrows a “channel” metaphor from television." But our dominant computer vocabulary relies on a much more limited set of possibilities. (It's really interesting to think, even though I won't here, about how language affects our thoughts. Can we think of something we don't have a word for?) It seems to me that there are great opportunities out there for people able to transcend our current conceptual metaphors in technology.

The Changing Reader

As I mentioned briefly last week, I spent Friday at the first ever Footnotes conference, subtitled thus: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies. If you're interested, you can read what Twitter (or, mostly me) thought of the conference. And if you're at all interested, you should check out Nick's recap on The Howling Fantods!, which is way more thorough and informed than any review attempted by me could hope to be. But I do want to elaborate on one point that seemed to recur throughout the conference: readers, as "consumers" of media, have changed as much as, if not more than, media in the last 30-40 years. This is true, I posit, even for forms that have been around all those years, namely, fiction and television/film.

The ways in which postmodern literature and film differ from their predecessors is fairly well established. There is no shortage of information on these changes on your friendly neighborhood internet, but since I've already linked to this once before, here's The L.A. Times' Jacket Copy blog's list of postmodern attributes. But perhaps not quite as developed is a study of how readers and film-watchers have changed over that same time period.

Consider, for example, something as simple as establishing shots on television. If you watch something as recent as Seinfeld, you'll notice the preponderance of establishing shots. The exterior of Jerry's apartment, the diner: these are some of the show's most iconic images. Compare that to "Souvenir," the eighth episode of the third season of Mad Men. If you haven't seen it, here's Alan Sepinwall on the cinematography of this episode (sans significant spoilers):

Included in the stylistic template of "Mad Men" is a reluctance to use establishing shots. Though we occasionally see the outside of the Sterling Cooper building, most scenes don't get any kind of transitional image to tell you, "Okay, now we're moving from here to here" or "Okay, we're back here on the following morning." It's not always that noticeable because the show does such long scenes, but there were several sequences in "Souvenir" where we just followed either Betty or Pete throughout their day, bam-bam-bam - no establishing shots, no dissolves or other obvious transitions, just one quick cut after another of their frustrated, empty lives.

I'm not saying that a lack of establishing shots is postmodern or that Mad Men is postmodern because it lacks establishing shots. But, in a way, this episode only works for sophisticated TV viewers who can follow extremely quick cut jumps, a skill which may require having watched countless hours of television to understand the conventions of the medium.

So what similar examples are true of readers? We may be more distrustful of narrators than readers of forty years ago. This questioning of authority is connected with the fact that, to paraphrase DFW, we're been marketed to very effectively for the entirety of our lives. Which came first? Authors going out of their way to make narrators inherently distrustful or readers learning not to take the written word at face value?

And since this post was inspired by a conference called Footnotes, let's think about footnotes. Reading used to be a basically linear activity. Except for reference books, you started reading on the first page and kept going until the end. Unless, of course, the author incorporated footnotes and endnotes, like DFW did, in a conscious effort to disrupt the narrative flow. But the way we read on the internet is unrestricted and deviating. I click from one page to another, with half a dozen tabs open at once. I do most of my reading on devices that can perform a multitude of tasks. It's surprisingly rare that I read one thing at a time, without distractions. Blog posts and, especially, Twitter seem to cater to this limited attention span reading environment. How will our reading expectations affect contemporary and future literature?

Google Throughout The Ages

For such a simplistic site, the Google main search page has gone through a fair number of changes since its launch in November 1998. Did anyone reading this remember that the wordmark above the search-box originally had an exclamation point appended to the end? I certainly didn't. To be fair, the extraneous bit of punctuation was there for less than a year.

Also of note is the page highlighting PC Magazine’s decision to award Google with its Technical Excellence Award way back in 1999. Good call, PC Magazine.

The internet is old.

Reading on the Internet

Two quick links to people who are thinking about how to improve reading things on the Internet.

Mandy Brown, a creative director at W.W Norton (& Co.!), wrote an article called "In Defense of Readers" for A List Apart, about webpage design:

Many sites scatter related content around the article, instead of focusing it at the top or bottom, where it’s more useful and less likely to be a distraction. If you want your users to skim the page, then by all means, fill the sidebar with content all the way down. But if you want them to read—if the page was written and not merely filled up, if the text consists of carefully crafted prose rather than bullet points—then respect the reading process and move that content elsewhere. The middle of an article should reflect the solitariness of reading with a design that neither interrupts the text nor the reader.

Related: via Kottke, something called arc90 Laboratory created this program called Readability. It basically strips away all the clutter surrounding the actual content on webpages. Their website has a better description, along with demonstrations and installation instructions.