ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 42 of 91

T is for Twitter and Too fast and Thoughtlessness and Trouble

Will it improve on the silence?

I joined Twitter in July 2007, I’m told. I tried it out for a few weeks but didn’t “get” it and frankly forgot about it for at least a couple of years.

Now I post my various blogs to it automatically through Networked Blogs. I only have about 7,100 tweets. I follow about 1,850 people and am followed by almost 1,300, but I am genuinely unconcerned about the numbers.

Whereas Twitter, for some people, seems to be the lifeblood for their connectedness to the world. Unfortunately, because it’s so easy because the message is necessarily so short – like people’s attention spans – folks have made bad choices on the platform:

In accusing someone of inappropriate financing, a woman shows how she flunked basic arithmetic.
Bloomsburg University’s Joey Casselberry, a junior first baseman, was thrown off the team after making a racist and sexist tweet about 13-year-old Little Leaguer Mo’ne Davis. To her credit, she asked that he be reinstated to his team.
SamuraiFrog pointed to a heartbreaking Canadian PSA “where homeless people read mean tweets about the homeless. Those are some heartless tweets written by people who don’t see other people as human beings.” And how much thought was given in the composition of their venom?
A tweet about AIDS and race gets a woman fired from her job.

In these, and many more examples, the problem is that it was too easy to attempt to be clever and snarky. The key to going viral, I’m told, is to say something everyone is thinking, and say it in a way no one thought of. The above examples were widely seen, but not in the way they would have wished.

The blog post Do We Know We Aren’t Really Thinking? speaks to this:

I am guilty of rushing to form an opinion without thinking through the various sides of the issue, without digging into the details, without remembering that an opinion is just that… This happens both in our personal interactions in our narrow domains as well as in the wider context when we are engaging with larger issues related to… the world.

Perhaps this tendency to form an opinion without thinking is exaggerated today thanks to the 24×7 information-overload we all experience through mass media and social media. But perhaps there is a bigger reason for why we don’t really think properly, why we believe we are thinking when we really are only experiencing thought-sensations.

It seems to me that most of us aren’t even aware that we are not really thinking when we believe we are. It is perhaps because we don’t know how our mind works. We don’t know what it takes to truly think without allowing any interference from other parts of ourselves. For the most part we don’t even know what those other parts are, parts which have a tendency to interfere and influence our thinking process.

There’s a trend in cooking called the slow food movement, designed “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat.” One appreciates the flavors more when one takes time to savor the food. That tomato sauce you put on the stove for hours tastes better than the stuff you heat up on the stove for seven minutes.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for a slow social media writing movement, about actually spending a moment or three assessing the IMPACT of one’s comment before clicking. Actually, there IS such a mechanism; ask yourself, Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

This is not a new notion. It has been attributed to Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader (b.1926): “Before you speak, think -Is it necessary? Is it true? Is it kind? Will it hurt anyone? Will it improve on the silence?” In the digital age, digital silence – or at least a respite – is often in order.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

S is for skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism increases your understanding of the product.

Friend Dan wrote to me about the word skeuomorphism, which was not in my vocabulary. But I didn’t see the email right away since it ended up in my spam folder, because “It’s written in a different language than your messages typically use.”

So what IS it? The Technopedia explains:

Skeuomorphism refers to a design principle in which design cues are taken from the physical world. This term is most frequently applied to user interfaces (UIs), where much of the design has traditionally aimed to recall the real world – such as the use of folder and files images for computer filing systems, or a letter symbol for email – probably to make computers feel more familiar to users.

Yeah, sure. I hadn’t thought about it, but that was a really ingenious idea.

However, this approach is increasingly being criticized for its lack of ingenuity and its failure to pioneer designs that truly harness a computer’s superior capabilities, rather than forcing it to merely mimic the behavior of a physical object.

Wait, what?

Skeuomorphism has increasingly come under fire, largely because many of the nostalgic elements it attempts to portray – such as calendars, day planners, address books, etc. – are almost entirely foreign to younger generations of users. In addition, critics of skeuomorphism point to this reliance of physical objects in design as an impediment to making more useful designs.

In fact, skeuomorphism in computers is already starting to die.

But, but, but, without those cues, I’d NEVER figure out any devices. It’s hard enough for me, as it is. I agree with Matt Webb, operator of BERG, “a design company that makes electronic devices incorporating human faces and emotions”:

“People that criticise skeuomorphism say it’s pointless, but I say it isn’t. It increases your understanding of the product. Technology is getting so complicated that we’re going to have to find ways for people to understand what it can do without having to spell it out.”

Or as friend Dan put it, ” It’s not so much fake as a bridge between two things or systems.”

The term long predates computers. From The Economist:

The term skeuomorph was originally coined in 1889 to refer to an ornamental design derived from the structure of an earlier form of a particular object… Examples would be car seats made of plastic, but textured to imitate leather; plastic spoons moulded with patterns to provide an echo of engraved silver; or imitation wood-grain printed on furniture or flooring.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

R for Radio

I’d especially listen to WWVA, Wheeling, WV, which played country artists such as George Jones, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, Jim Reeves, and Eddy Arnold.

I listen to so little radio these days, mostly when I wake up, or if The Wife is playing it in the car. However, growing up in Binghamton, NY, radio was what I listened to all the time. WENE in nearby Endicott is a sports station now, but in its heyday in the 1960s, it was THE place in the area to listen to the Top 40 hits.

At night, though, when I was about 9 to 13, I would listen to a wide array of stations all over the Northeast US via a clear-channel station, which “is an AM band radio station in North America that has the highest protection from interference from other stations, particularly concerning night-time skywave propagation.” This is NOT to be confused with the stations owned by the company formerly named Clear Channel, now iHeartMedia, Inc.

I’d get my portable radio and hide it under the covers to muffle the sound. I’d listen to WSM in Nashville, TN (country), WABC (Top 40, heavy on the Beatles), and especially WWVA, Wheeling, WV, which played country artists such as George Jones, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, Jim Reeves, and Eddy Arnold.

Some songs mentioning radio:

Turn Your Radio On – Ray Stevens (1971)
You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio – Joni Mitchell (1973)
Radio, Radio – Elvis Costello (1978)
On Your Radio – Joe Jackson (1979)
Do You Remember Rock N’ Roll Radio – Ramones (1980)
This Is Radio Clash – The Clash (1981)
Mexican Radio – Wall Of Voodoo (1983)
Devil’s Radio – George Harrison (1987)

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Q is for a quality voice: Marni Nixon

Marni Nixon was taken aback by Andrew Gold’s ‘Lonely Boy’ .

Movie buffs may have seen Deborah Kerr as Anna in The King and I (1956), Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story (1961), and/or Audrey Hepburn as Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964).

But when they sang on screen, their voices were all dubbed by the amazing Marni Nixon. Yet, her name appears nowhere in the films’ credits.

“Marni made her Broadway musical debut in 1954 in a show that lasted two months but nothing came from it. In 1955, the singer contracted to dub Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956) was killed in a car accident in Europe and a replacement was needed. Marni was hired…and the rest is history…

The studios brought her in to ‘ghost’ Ms. Kerr’s voice once again in the classic tearjerker An Affair to Remember (1957),” and other classic roles.

Listen to:
Marni Nixon – Movie and TV Clips (2006)
Marni Nixon on Dubbing for Marilyn Monroe and Deborah Kerr
Marni Nixon on the game show “To Tell the Truth” (December 7, 1964)

“She finally appeared on screen in a musical in The Sound of Music (1965) starring Julie Andrews… [but] she is only given a couple of solo lines in ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ as a singing nun.” Still, “she continued on with concerts and in symphony halls while billing herself as ‘The Voice of Hollywood’ in one-woman cabaret shows… Her last filmed singing voice was as the grandmother in the animated feature Mulan (1998).

“Married three times, twice to musicians; one of her husbands, Ernest Gold, by whom she had three children, was a film composer and is best known for his Academy Award-winning epic Exodus (1960).”

One of her children with Ernest Gold was the late Andrew Gold, who had a single Thank You For Being A Friend, which hit #25 on the Billboard charts in 1978. The song was later re-recorded by Cynthia Fee to serve as the theme song for the NBC sitcom The Golden Girls.

In the early 1990s, I saw him perform with group Bryndle, which included Kenny Edwards, Wendy Waldman, and Karla Bonoff.

But I know him best for a song called Lonely Boy, (#7 Billboard, 1977), which “was included in a number of film soundtracks, including Boogie Nights in 1997 and Adam Sandler’s 1998 movie The Waterboy, among others.” Although the lyrics included some facts of his life – “He was born on a summer day 1951” and “In the summer of ’53 his mother brought him a sister” – Gold insisted he had a happy childhood.

From Andrew Gold’s 2011 New York Times obit:

“His mother was taken aback [by ‘Lonely Boy’] She said, ‘Andy, oh, my God, the pain you must have felt.’ But he said he hadn’t even thought of it that way. He thought he was making it up.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

P is for phraseology

Arthur turned me on to the Anglophenia posts.

There is a movement at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, which I once visited, to “bring a collection of old school words back into the modern-day vernacular.” They are:

Caterwaul – A shrill howling or wailing noise.
Concinnity – The skillful and harmonious arrangement or fitting together of the different parts of something.
Flapdoodle – Nonsense.
Knavery – A roguish or mischievous act.
Melange – A mixture of different things.

Obambulate – To walk about.
Opsimath – A person who begins to learn or study only late in life.
Philistine – A person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them.
Rapscallion – A mischievous person.
Subtopia – Monotonous urban sprawl of standardized buildings.

Caterwaul and philistine I use as often as possible, myself.

Arthur asked: “But who’s championing the case of the words we should lose?”

Why, Lake Superior State University, ALSO in Michigan, is! LSSU put out its 40th Annual List of words to be banished, among them “bae,” “cra-cra”, “curated,” ”skill set,” ”takeaway”, and “polar vortex.” The only one that really makes me crazy is cra-cra, meaning crazy, and like terms that are no shorter than the original word, and sound foolish.

I do agree with the complaint about curate: “It used to have a special significance reserved mainly for fine art and museums. Now everything is curated. Monthly food and clothing subscription boxes claim to be finely ‘curated.'”

More phraseology

7 Lost American Slang Words.

The Daughter found it humorous that “monosyllabic” has five syllables. There’s one thing which we all — regardless of language — may have in common. One syllable, that is.

Flammable Versus Inflammable – What Is the Difference?
***
Arthur turned me on to the Anglophenia posts:

How To Speak British
How To Insult Like the British

Untying the Not describes the “Wicked Bible.”

15 unique illnesses you can only come down with in German

ABC Wednesday – Round 16