Christopher Butler

February 21st 2011

George Orwell, Why I Write

Posted at 8:00am.

“

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

”

February 20th 2011

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Alexander Star on Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint

(Source: popsubculture.com)

Posted at 7:56pm.

“

Time Out of Joint, which appeared in 1959, departed even further from the norms of science fiction. Its first hundred pages unfold a slow-paced story set in a small west coast town. Evidence that something is “out of joint” gradually amasses, until the startling scene when a soft-drink stand vanishes into a strip of paper labeled “soft-drink stand” and the entire community is revealed to be a Potemkin village; it is, in fact, an artificial replica of the ’50s constructed in 1994 to salve the nerves of the protagonist, whose sanity is essential to national security.

”

February 18th 2011

Capturing a Sense of Place in a Short Walk Through Carrboro

10 notes |#

Last summer my friend Michael and I agreed to a “swap” of projects. The idea was to somehow communicate a sense of place to one another, given that we live in very different places and have never visited each other’s home. I ended up depicting my walk to work in a video (of sorts), while he sent me a wonderful book (in PDF form, which I can’t share here) meditating on the idea rather than the particular place he is. Since then, I think about the difficulty of communicating the experience of place almost every time I make that walk to and from my office.

Then, the other day, I read a wonderful post by the author of The Age of Uncertainty blog (a very good blog, by the way) discussing what makes a successful urban environment and depicting a 10-minute walk from his front door. As I experienced a very captivating sense of place from his post, I thought, wow, I need to try that too! So, here it is.

I left my office at 5:08 p.m. this afternoon and began my walk home—normally about a 12-minute stroll. My goal was to communicate the diversity of textures and forms that I see on this walk every day and capture them with my tiny digital camera. So this time, since I stopped to take the occasional picture, it took me almost twice as long. One interesting thing I noticed as I uploaded these pictures is how they, in sequence, are actually a kind of clock, too, and viewing them with the time labels creates a sense of motion forward…

5:08 p.m.
Here I stand out front of my office, which is one of the older buildings in Carrboro. A former train depot (the train still runs past it regularly, delivering coal to the University campus nearby), it has also been home to a record label, a wine shop, and a coffee shop. Today, the first floor is Newfangled’s home; it’s second floor home to Blogads.

- - - -

5:09 p.m.
Right next door to my office is a place called The Merch, an old-school screen printing shop. On the right side of their building is a wonderful mural of the United States (you can see Alaska and Hawaii there) and on the front of the building is a cool sign that lights up at night. Minimal.

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5:10 p.m.
Before I crossed the tracks behind my office’s building, I had to stop and show the ground. Carrboro has a lot of this kind of terrain, which I think explains why I go through shoes so quickly.

- - - -

5:11 p.m.
Right on the other side of the tracks is a restaurant made out of trains! Southern Rail is actually a cluster of three trains joined by a central pavilion, and then attached (beyond the red train) to another depot building that is now a bar called The Station.

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5:12 p.m.
I turned left from my last view of the trains and crossed the parking lot toward the social center of Carrboro, Weaver Street Market. It’s a co-op as well as a cafe, and has a large lawn in front of it on which lots of people (especially today, it was over 70 degrees and sunny) love to hang out. I probably stop in here every day, sometimes just to walk through and visit, but often to grab a cup of coffee after lunch.

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5:14 p.m.
I continued on, passing the co-op and preparing to cross Greensboro Road. As I waited for the light to change, I snapped this picture—a sort of index of the passage of time, too. I wonder if it’s somebody’s job to come and pull out all those staples every now and then…

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5:16 p.m.
This little house sits on a side street down which I look every time I walk past, though I rarely actually turn right and get this close. I love this fence and the grass that grows along side of it—there’s a wonderful meeting of civilization and wild here.

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5:17 p.m.
Speaking of civilization, there is a lumber yard at the end of this little street, and this huge, insta-warehouse sits in back of it. It’s a stranger among the small, old wooden mill houses that fill the neighborhood.

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5:18 p.m.
On my way back up the side street, I snapped another picture of that fence I like. You can just make out this great, bright orange chair that sits on the patio beyond.

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5:21 p.m.
Back on the main road, I passed this old house, which actually is home to several offices. The sign gives you a sense for the intimacy of the town. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no online listing for this office space—sometimes the old-fashioned way works just fine.

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5:22 p.m.
Just up the block on the left is this cluster of houses—offices, also, actually. The back house was home to Newfangled for 9 months or so in 2006.

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5:23 p.m.
It’s closed now, but this restaurant, Country Junction, is hopping early in the morning. I’ve never eaten there but I often wonder why it has portholes.

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5:24 p.m.
Guess what this building is called? If you can make out the plaque at the bottom right, it reads, “The Point.” Clever, no? This building is quite pointy and sits at the intersection of Main and Weaver Streets.

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5:25 p.m.
I like this Citgo station for three reasons: The first is that it’s not a BP station. The second is that Citgo reminds me of Boston, where I grew up, which has a massive Citgo sign that lights up at night. And last, I like these old pumps—they look like robots.

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5:27 p.m.
On the subject of old-fashioned, I like the looks of this car, which is parked on a side street near the gas station in front of a house that has recently been renovated and fit with a snazzy red roof.

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5:27 p.m.
Just behind me is this drain, which makes itself quite clear.

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5:28 p.m.
Back to the main road, now. On the corner is a pretty house, and it’s corner lot is edged with a white-picket fence. You can’t see it in this picture, but a resident of the house is enjoying some R&R on her hammock just to the right.

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5:30 p.m.
This is my last stop. No, I don’t live at the fire station, but this is close enough. (After all, I’m posting this to the web.) Behind the station is a massive radio tower that sits between it and Carrboro’s town hall. I’ve taken many pictures of it…I’m not sure why. Also, I’ll admit that I walk past this spot many evenings and look up at the sky, hoping to see a UFO pass by.

Posted at 8:51pm and tagged with: Carrboro, one column, longreads,.

February 10th 2011

1 note |#

…when robots will be a part of the family…

(This was a Honda ad run back in the early 2000’s in WIRED magazine.)

Posted at 4:45pm and tagged with: robot,.

February 9th 2011

Recommended Reading

7 notes |#

On the Death Sentence by John Paul Stevens.
This essay, written (if you didn’t already know from the name) by one of our Supreme Court justices, echoed a conversation I recently had with friends about the question of justice and corporal punishment. I am firmly opposed to the death penalty, mostly out of conviction that human life is not ours to take, but also because I feel that execution makes a statement about the potential for redemption if not rehabilitation. Justice Stevens says toward the end of his essay, “Many of them [the condemned] have repented and made positive contributions to society. The finality of an execution always ends that possibility.” This speaks to the heart of my discomfort with the death penalty: rehabilitation and redemption is possible for everyone, no matter how ruined one’s life may appear. And so, the corollary of that belief is forgiveness—no less a challenge to the virtuous citizen than is the ground a murderer has to cover to redeem his or her life. If you don’t believe that, reflect on how often you forgive others. The issue is clearly hazardous, and I don’t want to make light of the nuances and legitimate difficulties that any moral and ethical system present to it in light of keeping the peace and exacting justice, but Stevens puts to words a point of view on the matter that I can support.

The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us, by Adam Gopnik
Aside from being an astute big-picture assessment of the questioning-of-the-internet-as-a-boon-to-society-or-not thread in the zeitgeist, Gopnik’s piece is a superb piece of writing. Trust me—you’ll probably get through this roughly 4,500-word piece (on the impact of technology on culture, mind you) in under half an hour—that means something! Here’s a taste (as for context, Gopnik refers to those who say that the contemporary question of the internet’s challenge to culture is nothing new and has been the case of previous technologies as “Ever Wasers”):

Blair’s and Pettegree’s work on the relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

Armed with such parallels, the Ever Wasers smile condescendingly at the Better-Nevers and say, “Of course, some new machine is always ruining everything. We’ve all been here before.” But the Better-Nevers can say, in return, “What if the Internet is actually doing it?” The hypochondriac frets about this bump or that suspicious freckle and we laugh—but sooner or later one small bump, one jagged-edge freckle, will be the thing for certain. Worlds really do decline. “Oh, they always say that about the barbarians, but every generation has its barbarians, and every generation assimilates them,” one Roman reassured another when the Vandals were at the gates, and next thing you knew there wasn’t a hot bath or a good book for another thousand years.”

Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?: How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big Brother, by William D. Hartung
This is one of those things you just need to read in order to get a dose of reality and your mind around the scope of how radically our country has changed in short time. We’ve been in a prolonged state of quasi-war for too long—longer than any other point in American history. But what’s more disturbing about that, especially in light that historical arguments can be made that warfare is the norm for humanity, is that this time around, there is little in the way of day-to-day or tangible sacrifice for a substantial majority of Americans. The media hides the reality. We can avoid seeing the injured and maimed veterans of the post 9-11 conflicts. There are no rations, no war-induced industries that inspire patriotic community. On the contrary, there has been the massive privatization of warfare, which has certainly boosted an economy, though whether we can say it’s ours is another question altogether.

On the Potential for Branded Robots, by Tom Saunter
An interesting musing on how robotics will shape the not-so-distant future economy and brand landscape. We’re clearly headed for a time of applied robotics that is far less anthropomorphically cuddly than we anticipated, but the question is to what degree we’ll let these ‘bots in. Note my comment toward the bottom of the response thread. My sense is that the robots we’ll be sharing space with will be smarter versions of the objects and appliances we already depend upon.

The Sad Case of Edward Mordrake
This is a very short Wikipedia entry on a 19th century British nobleman who, according to vague history (and perhaps rumor) had a second face on the back of his head (likely a fetus infitu). Because it could not be removed, Mordrake likely had a miserable existence, which he ended himself at the age of 23. (via the always-interesting Matt Webb)

Posted at 10:18pm and tagged with: links, two column, longreads,.

January 31st 2011

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My latest article is up…

Your Website is Not For You!

You know that old gag where the husband gives his wife a bowling ball for her birthday? Or the much-reviled (but sadly true) stereotype of the overzealous soccer parents who are one outburst away from joining the game themselves? Each of these are classic examples of what happens when you make the mistake of thinking that something meant for someone else is all about you.

You’ve probably seen this happen plenty at work, too. I call it “client narcissism.” It manifests itself in many ways, but here’s an easy one: your client, a retailer, is spending weeks working out the details of the “About Us” section of their website, which they insist should be the second option in the main navigation. Instinctively, you sense that prioritizing that kind of inside information is off-point, but you don’t exactly know how to clue your client in. You could be blunt:

“Sorry, but tell the Vice President of such-and-such that the customers probably care just as little about who he is as he does about the sneakers his company sells.”

Right, try that one out if you’re comfortable with shedding a client or two. But if you want to keep your client—or better yet, continue to develop your consultative position with them—you’re definitely going to need to try something a bit more subtle and strategic.

Read the rest here >

Posted at 4:43pm and tagged with: web, web-design, planning,.

My latest article is up…
Your Website is Not For You!
You know that old gag where the husband gives his wife a bowling ball for her birthday? Or the much-reviled (but sadly true) stereotype of the overzealous soccer parents who are one outburst away from joining the game themselves? Each of these are classic examples of what happens when you make the mistake of thinking that something meant for someone else is all about you. You’ve probably seen this happen plenty at work, too. I call it “client narcissism.” It manifests itself in many ways, but here’s an easy one: your client, a retailer, is spending weeks working out the details of the “About Us” section of their website, which they insist should be the second option in the main navigation. Instinctively, you sense that prioritizing that kind of inside information is off-point, but you don’t exactly know how to clue your client in. You could be blunt: “Sorry, but tell the Vice President of such-and-such that the customers probably care just as little about who he is as he does about the sneakers his company sells.” Right, try that one out if you’re comfortable with shedding a client or two. But if you want to keep your client—or better yet, continue to develop your consultative position with them—you’re definitely going to need to try something a bit more subtle and strategic.
Read the rest here >

January 28th 2011

Small Hints of a Bigger World

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I’ve managed to do a decent amount of writing since last weekend. On both Saturday and Sunday I must have spent about 4 focused hours at home—disconnected, this is essential for some reason—writing about 50% of the final chapter of my book. Since then I put in a few more hours over the week and have just about finished it. I decided to start with the last chapter since it’s material—the web of tomorrow—is fresh on my mind after my presentation earlier this month. I enjoyed the process and the feeling of productivity. If I can wrap up the chapter today, I’ll have written one entire chapter in a week. That’s a faster clip than I need to follow for the process, but since I probably can’t rely upon consistent productivity from now until September, that’s probably a good thing.

Meanwhile… On my walk to work this morning, I stopped and looked at a sewer pipe that had a frozen stream of water coming out from it. I remembered being a young child and having glimpses of things like that and getting the sense of a much larger world around me. For a child, a simple sewer pipe can be a small hint of a bigger world. At that age, maybe 4 or 5, even if you’ve been to many places, your sense of place is much more immediate. You’ve yet to master your own body, let alone the house you live in, it’s yard, your street, and beyond. Most everything is bigger than you are; you crawl and then toddle your way through a world built by and for bigger people, and until you are big as they are, you can’t fully comprehend that world. Beds are more like new landscapes than furniture designed for adult bodies. Cars are more like moving rooms than they are vehicles to extend the mobility of adult bodies. And a sewer pipe—a piece of a system meant to recede in the day to day experience of an adult—looks more like a doorway to a child, beyond which lies another world shrouded in mystery.

Catching a glimpse of that other world, and of course not knowing that it leads to just more of the same—water-filled pipes—can widen a child’s eyes and impart the truth that their world is much, much larger than they ever knew.

Posted at 9:43am.

January 27th 2011

The web is the largest and most important cultural artifact in human history.

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…something I’m working through in the book. I think we take this for granted…

Posted at 8:16pm and tagged with: WEB,.

January 27th 2011

Wonder and Humankind

2 notes |#

From “The End of the Beginning,” by Ray Bradbury:

“All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That’s what’s so really big about tonight…it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowingly celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second in the next hour. But we’re in at the end of a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honorable.”

Three minutes…two minutes fifty-nine seconds…two minutes fifty-eight seconds…

“But,” said his wife, “I still don’t know why.”

Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!

Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We’ll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.

Posted at 4:00pm and tagged with: two column,.

January 27th 2011

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“We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed…”

Posted at 8:57am.

January 25th 2011

10 notes |#

Why it’s been quiet around here…

The immediate visual impression of my archive is stark: I’m posting less and less to Tumblr. I had only 8 posts in December, compared with 140 posts the previous December. Part of the reason is that I just really needed a break toward the end of 2010, which was a very busy year for me.

The reason I’m still not posting much is because I’ve begun working on a book that will be published toward the end of 2011 by HOW Books and need to focus on that. (Pictured is partly what that looks like right now.) I’m not saying I won’t post here anymore, but as I adjust to my new workload, it will probably result in a bit less than before.

Wish me luck, it’s my first book!

Posted at 2:18pm and tagged with: writing,.

Why it’s been quiet around here…
The immediate visual impression of my archive is stark: I’m posting less and less to Tumblr. I had only 8 posts in December, compared with 140 posts the previous December. Part of the reason is that I just really needed a break toward the end of 2010, which was a very busy year for me.
The reason I’m still not posting much is because I’ve begun working on a book that will be published toward the end of 2011 by HOW Books and need to focus on that. (Pictured is partly what that looks like right now.) I’m not saying I won’t post here anymore, but as I adjust to my new workload, it will probably result in a bit less than before.
Wish me luck, it’s my first book!

January 18th 2011

The Good Stuff

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A friend of mine just asked me for some online reading recommendations, which was great because it presented an opportunity to look over my Google Reader subscription list (a bit overweight right now with 128 feeds) and figure out which were really important to me. The one’s that I almost always read. The ones that I get excited about when I see a new post has been published. So, here’ they are, cut-and-pasted from the email I sent him (in no particular order):

The Chronicle of Higher Education
This online publication covers a wide variety of issues (education, literacy, technology, ethics, etc.), excepting politics (thank God). I read just about every article that comes to my reader. Here’s an example of a recent good one:
http://chronicle.com/article/Programmed-for-Love-The/125922/

Nicholas Carr
Author of several books; his most recent is The Shallows. The book has been controversial, but Carr is quite thoughtful and technologically informed. He’s mostly interested in the behavioral/cognitive effect of ubiquitous computing. One of his recent posts:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/01/short_is_the_ne.php

City of Sound
Architectural/musical/design-ical variety. Written by Australians. Always good. Here’s a recent post about the flood havoc in Queensland:
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2011/01/flood.html

Matt Webb
He’s the CEO of BERG, which is the UK firm that made the first iPad magazine platform (Mag). We watched their demo at our last winter retreat. He’s an interesting guy, all around.
http://interconnected.org/home/

Serial Consign
Similar to City of Sound, though probably less posts and more interviews. Good material, in general. Here’s a recent interview with a sound artist:
http://serialconsign.com/2011/01/mitchell-akiyama-interview

The Age of Uncertainty
A blog written by a UK book enthusiast. I’m linking to a series of posts that chronicle a diary this blogger found amidst a bunch of books at a bookstore written by a mid-century British mormon. No more explanation is necessary, but seriously, read it:
http://ageofuncertainty.blogspot.com/search/label/Derek%27s%20diaries

Russell Davies
A UK media planner, etc. who keeps a decent blog and writes a monthly column for WIRED UK. Here’s a recent WIRED piece:
http://ageofuncertainty.blogspot.com/search/label/Derek%27s%20diaries
And here’s a recent blog post (the one that prompted the music-for-shuffle thing):
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2011/01/a-this-for-a-that.html

Edge.org
Scientific/technological/cultural highbrow stuff:
http://www.edge.org/archive.html

David Byrne’s online journal
He’s a good writer, too! A recent one that I think will be of interest:
http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2010/12/12610-12710-tokyo.html

James Bridle
A UK publisher and all around future-of-the-book enthusiast. He’s among the Davies, Webb, etc. crew. Here’s a post that was good:
http://booktwo.org/notebook/mbsp-sxsw/

The New Inquiry
All of their posts are good. All of them.
http://thenewinquiry.com/

Michal Migurski
Technology head of Stamen who works/writes mostly about data viz and new mapping techniques. Pretty interesting stuff.
http://mike.teczno.com/

Ok, those are my recommendations. What are yours?

Posted at 1:55pm and tagged with: two column, longreads,.

January 13th 2011

9 notes |#

The Web of Tomorrow

We’re doing monthly lunch and learns at Newfangled now—sessions where one of us shares a presentation (over lunch) on something that interests us and is applicable to what we do. Today I presented on “The Web of Tomorrow,” which covered a bit of the history of the web, specifically connecting some of the key ideas that paved the way, and then where I think it’s all going. Here are the slides and a writeup of the gist of it… (Also, you can view the slides at full size in the Flickr set I created.)

Read the full writeup here >

Posted at 4:11pm and tagged with: the-future, web-development, web-enhanced-devices, longreads,.

The Web of Tomorrow
We’re doing monthly lunch and learns at Newfangled now—sessions where one of us shares a presentation (over lunch) on something that interests us and is applicable to what we do. Today I presented on “The Web of Tomorrow,” which covered a bit of the history of the web, specifically connecting some of the key ideas that paved the way, and then where I think it’s all going. Here are the slides and a writeup of the gist of it… (Also, you can view the slides at full size in the Flickr set I created.)
Read the full writeup here >

January 12th 2011

1 note |#

(Source: roughtype.com)

Posted at 10:41am and tagged with: video, digital-literacy,.

January 4th 2011

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My latest article is up. Here’s the intro…

How SEO Works

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” an insight that sheds a great deal of light on why our historical predecessors, without access to much of the knowledge we take for granted today, believed some of what they did. But it also applies to contemporary technologies, some of which we depend upon greatly yet understand only in part (or perhaps not at all).

The evolution of the meaning and use of the word “Google”—from proper noun to verb—corresponds with the increasing disconnect between web users and search technology. Ten years ago, searching for content on the web was a difficult process, but today one has only to enter a few words into Google’s search bar, and Presto! (magical incantation intended) instant and accurate results. As much as this might seem like magic, it’s a thoroughly mundane—albeit ingenious—technology at work. But if search engine technology is indistinguishable from magic, the process of optimizing web content for search engines will seem just as mysterious. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to trust what we don’t understand, and mistrust breeds the very kind of problems that are rampant in the search engine optimization industry: myths, abuses, and profit for those that would prefer to be seen as magicians than marketers.

Fortunately, we know enough about how search engines work to optimize our content withwords, not wands. While there is some value in examining the myths and abuses of SEO, I think it makes sense to first explore how it works. I’ll start with a brief explanation of how search engines (I’ll focus on Google) work, then explain how web content can be optimized for them. Knowing how search engine optimization, in it’s most basic form, really works will shed some light on the misunderstandings that often get in the way of doing it well…

Read the rest >

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: web-development, seo, search, web-design,.