Author Archives: Dave

Author, blogger, thinker, developer, and all-around digital creative. Applied theatre professional. Mac enthusiast. Coffee fanatic.

Slowly Adapting

Lady Justice

I remember this local store in my hometown that my parents used to visit nearly every week in some capacity or other. I couldn’t tell you what the store sold specifically. In my memory, perceptually distorted now (way) more than twenty years later, the shop seemed like perhaps an antique store, or a place similarly cluttered. I was never interested in what they sold in the front. When we visited, I went to the back, where there were four walls that were bookshelves, floor to ceiling, of used books. There was a hush that fell when you walked into the back of that store, as though the words, thoughts and ideas contained within those thousands of pages absorbed the stress of the outside world. I loved going there. My love of bookstores began at an early age, and have stayed with me since.

Today, I still love visiting used bookstores. I have other motivators now, as well…namely, that I would much prefer to give my business to a local establishment. This is the same reason that I make every effort to buy my comic books from local shops, as well, even though I find reading them digitally to be quite addictive.

This weekend, I watched our daughter run and squeal excitedly through the children’s section of our local library. I am thrilled that she is thrilled around books. She brings them to us, asks to sit on Daddy’s lap and have a book read to her. I want her to fall more and more in love with books every day.

The reason that I’m excited by new media is that it makes possible the discovery of great art, important ideas and critical information to those who quite possibly would not have had this access in the beginning. Yet, this leaves me torn at times. I was exploring our same library’s ebook offerings this weekend, and found them sorely disappointing. When I decide to buy a new book, the first place I go is to my Nook. I would rather download and click than turn pages. I think that it is wonderful to have access to great books in this way. And, all the while, I’m cognizant that we may be losing something important in the transition. In the interest of balance, I try to do things like visit used book stores regularly.

Still, this passing concern re-surfaced over the weekend when I read this article about the controversy over the first sale doctrine. This court case is fascinating as it depicts how our legal system struggles to keep pace with technological innovations. We’re potentially at risk of legal action with the most innocent and natural usages of our technology, it would seem, and even those who prefer to purchase our media legally aren’t safe.

Of course, this brings us around to the issue of big businesses controlling artistic expression in the name of profit, as well, but that is a topic for at least one of its own posts.

One of two things needs to happen: either our legal system needs to keep pace, or our innovation must slow. I don’t want innovation to slow, for exactly the benefits that I mentioned earlier. And, I don’t think that it will. I know that I want our daughter to enjoy the same freedom of passing books and music that she loves between friends and family as I did in my childhood. I want that to be even easier for her than it was for me, and I don’t want legal tripwires to prevent that from being a part of her life, or to limit it in her life.

I think that it might, though, if we don’t learn to speed this process up a bit.

Photo Attribution: JvL under Creative Commons

Again. And Again.

My first year living in New England, and Boston is the subject of senseless violence in what is now being referred to with the “t”-word. If I am to apply the seriousness by which my friends in other parts of the country take these events…that is, by which events cause phone calls and text messages to arrive inquiring as to whether or not I am okay…as a litmus test for their level of tragedy, then I suppose I haven’t experienced anything quite of this magnitude since that day on a past September that we all wish had never occurred. Still, those of us in the U.S. now have another day on which we will be able to identify where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

The 9/11 attacks were particularly dramatic for me as I was traveling by air when they occurred. When the tragedy of Virginia Tech was wrought, I lived only about an hour away. On Monday, I was in class just outside of Boston. My first instinct was to feel what those who orchestrate these events want us to feel: fear. Or, at least uncertainty. I’ve never panicked during these events, but one certainly feels anxious at times.

Now, another moment has occurred in which I want to scream as loudly as I can, “For God’s sake, for the sake of all that is holy, we have to stop killing each other!” Yet, man never seems happy unless we’re doing just that. Often in the name of an ideology, or under the flag of patriotism, or occasionally even in the name of God (which doesn’t make Him happy at all, I suspect), we continue to do exactly that. We ambush, we invade, we attack, we let the wrath of our righteous anger fall.

I’m not sure our anger is righteous, but when we hear that the fatalities of this latest attack include a child, our anger is at least justifiable. And, so, angry we are.

And stern if veiled threats are made from a leader’s podium.

And, days or weeks or months from now, actions of retribution will be taken in the name of justice, and more bodies will likely be added to the count. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find yet another reason to wage war against someone else.

The cycle will continue, because it’s easier to respond to violence with violence than to take the higher ground. Partly, I think, because the higher ground is obscured in these moments. As I said, our anger is justifiable. It is difficult to see higher ground through such a fog.

Still, that doesn’t stop the cycle.

I’m not naive enough to think that it will stop, though, at least not completely. Sociologically, I see it continuing. Theologically, I see it continuing. Realistically, I know that it will continue. That grim resignation, though, does nothing to lift the weariness that I feel in my soul when I know that more souls have been ripped from our company without cause or reason. I’m so, so exhausted with the weight of the knowledge that human life continues to be taken by other humans.

Karen said to me last night in a succinct moment of realism, “It will only get worse.”

“I know.” I responded. “But that doesn’t make it any easier to take.”

Backward and Forward

I was a sophomore in high school when America entered yet another war, and I remember sitting in the back of my parents’ car on the way to a church service and hearing on the radio that what had become known as Operation Desert Storm was in full swing. We went home that evening, and I turned on the television to see coverage of what was transpiring on the other side of the world. I had never been cognizant of my country being at war before, and I felt all of the anxieties and emotions that went with it. I didn’t know where to turn as news channels were concerned, and I remember settling on CNN, simply because that was the one that I could think of and find first.

The network sort of stuck with me. I remember how the programming changed through the years, as I watched it nearly every morning, especially after I finished college. I don’t watch much live news programming any more, as cable is a relic of a bygone age in our household. Still, CNN remains a primary source from which I get the headlines, usually via phone or tablet somewhere between breakfast and the end of the morning commute. Taking the time to watch a program in the morning really isn’t so much a luxury that I have any more.
It’s interesting to reflect on how my news watching has changed over the years. I transitioned from cable, to podcasts, to streaming live coverage, to reading it within a mobile application. The progression has seemed so natural that I really haven’t even thought about it.
Until the most recent update to CNN’s iPad app, though, which now launches with the sound byte of James Earl Jones proclaiming, “This…is CNN”, apparently a network-wide return to its roots. Hearing it took me back to random evenings in high school sitting in front of the television. There was a segue from this into a general memory of spending weekday evenings watching television with my parents, and the feeling of safety and family that such a memory invokes.
Now, I’m more than aware of the studies linking regular television viewing to degradation in family communication…we haven’t let our daughter watch television until nearly the age of two. The memories of doing so with my parents, though, remain a wonderful recollection for me today.
I wonder if our daughter will experience anything similar, as watching broadcast programming is such an increasing rarity. I don’t think that there’s anything missing in that experience, per se, but I am curious as to what events that Karen and I consider commonplace will evolve and form wonderful memories for our daughter…and maybe that she’ll even nostalgically blog about later in life at some point. That will be beautiful news to me.

Collision of Worlds

I was spending part of my lunch break yesterday across the street from the building where I have classes, mentally adding to the ever-growing list of books that I would buy if had money (and will buy when I do…being a full-time student again has serious financial downsides).

The problem with being so passionate about an interdisciplinary perspective is that sometimes (or, in fact, often) you experience a collision of worlds. The subcultures of the disciplines that I’ve studied can be so wildly different that it’s difficult to reconcile them. Theatre culture and theological culture can be on opposite ends of the spectrum, for example. The literary world and the world of the Internet have critical disagreements on core ideas, such as how (or even if) we read.

I was struck by this yet again as I stood in the bookstore yesterday, lamenting the fact that I haven’t had time to read or write fiction at any substantive level in the last three months. And, while I am reading a great deal, Javascript or PHP manuals simply don’t create the same mental synergy, even though they are tools for creativity.

I liken it to my theatre experience in many ways (theatre has always been the lens through which I view the world). A great deal of my theatre experience during my undergrad days was as a designer. I acted very little, and only began directing within the last five years or so. Theatre design, whichever sub-genre you choose (I was mostly a sound designer, with occasional scenic or lighting flirtations) is very technical, but creative in its problem-solving. It creates a wonderful scaffold for the rest of the medium to do its work. Web development is much the same. I’m no visual artist, and, by extension, I’m no graphic designer, nor would I ever claim to be. The way that the web functions, though, requires similarly technical design and scaffolding, and its that area into which I’m (fingers crossed) making a career change.

I don’t think, either, that Internet culture has to be mutually exclusive of literary culture. The Internet is a communications medium, not a work of art in itself. It allows us to experience works of art more easily and even more fully, though, be it beautiful visual design (perhaps even of the website itself), or a wonderful work of contemporary literature, or anything in between.

That’s sort of how I reconcile the discord between the subcultures that I’m convinced only appears on the surface. When we dig deeper, we find, as always, that every discipline overlaps every other, and that we are always more alike than we are different.