Olympic Fantasy

I have this Olympic fantasy.

It's not what you may think.  I don't wonder about running the fastest race or swimming the speediest laps or diving the most perfect dive.  (Though daydreaming about standing on that podium is pretty real.)

It is a much simpler thought.  When athletes wait in their warm up gear far away from the crowds prior to competing, they are often seen with earbuds in place, listening to whatever psychs them up for their moment. Michael Phelps immediately comes to mind. And while I often ponder what they are listening to, it is secondary to a much bigger question, which is:

What device are they using?

Is it a phone? An iPod Shuffle, Nano, Classic, iTouch, or iPod 'something else?' Maybe another brand of MP3 player or perhaps some spiffier version of one that I don't know about? (A very real possibility.) 

I have been an iPod Classic girl for eight years and before that, an iPod Mini girl.  Yep, in the world of high tech options, this girl has happily stayed the outdated course.  

My beloved iPod Classic

There is so much to love about it.  The smooth click wheel advancing to many musical options, playlists of my own design, sorting music by genre, album, artist.  Being my own DJ to suit a mood, a running time, gardening time, sewing time, at work, or background music when cooking in the kitchen.  And with no interrupting ads.

So when my device stopped working, a google search for "iPod Classic Repair" reaped a result equivalent to Hamlet's lament, "To die, to sleep no more."   The Classic is no more. 

What?  

This is astonishing! Especially since it happened almost TWO YEARS ago. Pining about this to my music savvy oldest daughter, she took pity on me and emailed an article which both laments and appreciates the magical MP3 player.   In her "Ode to the iPod Classic," author Lindsay Zoladz (a millennial) captures the pure joy of the device and touches on the larger issue of choice.  

It seems the open ended choices offered by music streaming services can result in a feeling of inertia for the listener.  Sometimes too much is too much.  Zoladz offers what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the "paradox of choice." He states that when we are presented with seemingly limitless choices, we struggle more than if the choices were limited. "Too much choice can leave us feeling paralyzed and anxiety-ridden and with so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all." Take that Apple Music and Tidal! 

My first iPod - a mini! 

Another surprising factoid is that, unlike Apple's premeditated obsolescence with its other products, the cessation of the Classic was a matter of fewer buyers and too much engineering.  CEO Tim Cook explained in the same article, "It wasn't a matter of me swinging the ax, saying 'what can I kill today?' The engineering work was massive and the number of people who wanted it, very small." 

A quick eBay search offers a glimpse into where the Classic resale market is right now. At the high end is a "collector's set" of three 1st generation devices never opened from their factory sealed packaging for the sum of $50,000!  On the low end, once you get past the sad junkyard of Classics being sold for parts, the cost varies by generation and storage.  A used 7th generation, 120GB lists for $228.00.  

I brought my device to the nearby Apple store to confer with a "genius" (oh that hyperbolic job description.) It felt like attending the wake of a doddering old uncle. Taking pity on me, the Apple employee did his best to let me down easy.  Sensing my pain, he set me up for a phone conference with another Apple tech person who could walk through how the device responded (or not) as it was connected to iTunes. Again, no juice. 

In a most sweet gesture, my daughter who admitted she remembers a time when she thought she'd never part with her Classic, has long moved on to a music streaming service and bestowed her device to me.  A fitting safety net for my iPod grief.  

For now, victory is mine and I feel like a gold medal winner.  Classic. 

Link to Barry Schwartz's 2005 TED Talk re: choice https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en

Link to "Ode to The iPod Classic:
https://theringer.com/an-ode-to-the-ipod-classic-629e89681c6e#.jsk8vyk06

Within Reach Yet Out of Touch

I am the fourth of four children.

Most baby pictures of me include some or all of my siblings.  My baby book contains my name, birth date, length and weight and little else.

This in no way represents a lack of love or attention from my parents.  It does offer a peak at one of life's simple facts i.e. as the number of kids goes up, the attention to some detail goes down. My mom, in her words, always “hated detail” which translated into precious few notations into baby books and even precious fewer photos of just me.

So, of course, I grew up craving detail, and instructions, and rules.  It’s sad, I know. I hear the universe giggle every darn day.

My youngest daughter's baby book

My oldest daughter's baby book

I think one of the most outward expressions of my need to embrace detail (oh, let’s face it, correct the past) is the collection of photo albums and baby books I have maintained for both of my daughters.  Like any new parent, I photographed each girl as much as possible. Like any fourth of four children, I made sure my younger daughter had many, many photos taken of just her.  Oh yes, no child of mine was going to search for solo pictures of herself that did not exist or wonder when her first tooth fell out.

I was going to get this detail right.  And I did, pretty much.  Then, I let the digital age take the wheel.

Some family photo albums.

My daughters grew up when film photography was all there was.  Delayed gratification ruled the day.  There was no immediate photo preview on the camera. Ordering double prints was the fancy deal of the day.  And I ordered them – like crazy.  I needed prints for each girl’s photo album and one for our family photo album.  I like to think of this as merely covering all the bases but it has the ominous scent of OCD. 

And those photo Christmas cards taken every year? A copy of each is in both girls’ baby books so they have a continuous record.  Birthday invitations? Have ‘em along with a detailed description of the day.  First tooth? First doctor visit? Height and weight for each annual physical? Check. Check. Check. 

Oh dear.

This is why Carina Chocano’s NY Times Magazine piece titled “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg” grabbed me.  Ms. Chocano posits that as the tactile things of memories (photos, letters, music, keepsakes) are relegated to devices as data, we are distilling them into thin air and losing something real. “For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association,” she writes.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/what-happens-when-data-disappears.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=carina%20chocano&st=cse

Digital Photos

Her experience with data loss, (photos of her 3 year-old disappearing when her phone died) and a friend’s total data loss when her hard drive and back-up hard drive storage both died, sparked the author’s thoughts about what turns humans into cyborgs. She notes, “Our devices allow us to compress time and space in a way that we’re able to mentally transport ourselves between planes of existence with the touch of a button. (Or, rather, a digital rendering of a button).”   I realized I have succumbed to the vapor.

Most of the photos I’ve taken in the last five or six years rest in cyberspace on my external hard drive or stored in ‘albums’ on my phone or Shutterfly.com  I’ve lost touch with the touch of them.

My first and only attempt at scrapbooking was in 2009 when my oldest graduated high school.  I pillaged her computer for some photos since she naturally took over the job of photographing events in her life when she bought a camera.  I marveled at the life she was building.  I mean, I knew she was moving beyond life at home, but this abstract awareness solidified as dozens of photos I’d never seen whisked by me. 

Photo frames are digitized so a photo collection stored on a teeny memory card scrolls along presenting an eternal slideshow.  As I recently stood in line at a local funeral home to pay respects to a friend who's mother had died, I marveled at the large screen slideshow displaying photos of her life.  But I was physically drawn to the poster collages and various letters created by family members.  The items were lovingly placed along where visitors waited in line. I caught myself gently gliding my finger across parts of them, not in a touchscreen swipe, but as though I was touching her. The closer I could get to the memory of this woman, the better. Feeling a creased black and white picture from her childhood sure helped.

AT&T’s 1979 award winning slogan urging us to “Reach Out and Touch Someone” resonates.  Who could have predicted how we would apply that suggestion today? Ms. Chocano observes that her futuristic 3-year-old is “given to swiping a finger across things like TV sets and laptop screens and declaring them broken when they fail to respond to her touch.”

 I understand what we are gaining by increased digitization but I don’t understand if we see what is being sacrificed.  Or, maybe we press on embracing the iCloud or other external and ethereal "places" because to do anything less is to get left behind in the march to, well, where exactly?

Browsing book stores or record stores, something I definitely took for granted, now elicits a cherished nostalgia.  The release of vinyl albums and the efforts of small book store owners to stay afloat point to a quixotic human need to touch.  Author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto and State of Wonder) recently visited The Colbert Report TV show to promote not her book but a book store she recently opened in Nashville. The store name, Parnassus Books, is an homage to Mount Parnassus believed to be the Greek mythological home of learning, literature and music. http://www.parnassusbooks.net/  Ms. Patchett is putting her money where her books are, quite literally.

Times author Chocano addresses this reach back, noting “It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible more linear and more contextual.”  I recall when our new elementary school was built about ten years ago.  My youngest was in kindergarten and the classroom in which she learned to tell time had a lone digital clock.  This rattled me.  Was analog dead? Well, the watch display case at Macy’s jewelry department tells me otherwise, but it sure isn’t on the rise.

At one of my high school reunions, a woman named Patty who was integral in its planning did something so spontaneous that it sticks with me today.  As she rushed out the door to the event, she had a flash that many alums would be talking and asking about each other's children.  She glanced at her kids' photos nearest the door, grabbed them and sped out.  When I picked up my reunion name tag, I noticed an array of 5 x7 and 8 x 10 framed photographs of kids displayed alongside. I first thought they were of alums as youngsters until I asked Patty. I howled at her snappy reasoning.  Patty brought me into her world with one swipe of her arm.  Today, I think the we would be swapping phones containing photos. Effective? Yes. Heartfelt? Not as much as seeing those framed photos. I was knocked out by her fun reflex and quick thinking!

Of course we can't be lugging around framed photographs all the time, but we can become more engaged by their physicality.

An over reliance on digitization feels like I'm asking my eyes to do the work of my hands. I am human after all – with an array of senses all of which must be fully engaged.  I want to remember because I know how to. I want to reach out and touch.  Ms. Chocano's thoughtful conclusion resonates, “Maybe our desire to digitize and archive every little thing is not a proof of a fear of forgetting.  It’s a manifestation of our urge to remember how to remember.” 

A Facebook Birthday

The sentiments may be redundant, but c'mon, who doesn't love feeling the full burst of Facebook friend well wishes on their birthday?

Even with my paltry double digit number of Facebook friends, I become giddy as each wish appears. This year I was out of town for my birthday, so seeing those greetings come up on my smartphone while I was far away from home held sentimental sway for me. I am an easy target.

A piece in today's New York Times elaborates on the Facebook birthday and the comments that follow it reveal reader discontent that got my attention. Virginia Heffernan's Opinionator piece titled "The Social Economics of a Facebook Birthday" causes me to emerge from a birthday wish stupor to once again be reminded that every point has a counterpoint and catch myself saying, "Hmmmm..didn't consider that."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/the-social-economics-of-a-facebook-birthday/?ref=opinion

Ms. Heffernan's article captures the efficiency of Facebook greetings and expands on the pluses and minuses. Yes, there are minuses. The disjointed Greek chorus of comments is in full voice and I find myself agreeing with some of the points made.

Part of the allure of reading articles on line is the collection of comments they consistently attract and the 120 comments as of this writing that follow the Times article did not disappoint.

Concern about personal information floating across the internet and in fear of identity theft were popular warnings from some readers. One reader stated that "Facebook is not social. It's financial." I argue it is both. Jennifer from New York referred to the networking site as "Fakebook" in her terse tirade.  I think she's had a less than good experience.

It was the remarks regarding friendship and how friends reach out that interested me the most. It seems to some that the FB posts represent a bare minimum outreach from folks on the perimeter of our lives, making the volume full but insincere. If someone knows its your birthday and purchases a card that resonates, writes a personal note, addresses it and remembers to mail it, the effort made outperforms some quick keystrokes and exclamation points. Yet, FB has a message feature that allows me to write a personal message to any friend which is just seen by them - this also shows sincere effort even if it is intangible. (The fact that the US postal service is planning to cut one third of its workforce, some 120,000 workers, by 2015 confirms the impact of the electronic message).

I am consistently hopeful that the mailbox at the end of my driveway will contain something personal each day that I collect the mail. I am disappointed 95 percent of the time (I repeat, an easy target am I), but on those few occasions when a note, a card, or, gasp- a letter sits among the hodgepodge of junk mail and bills my spirit lifts.  No amount of emails or FB posts can match that feeling for me. 

David Plotz, whose article from Slate was the basis for Ms. Heffernan's piece, spits lightening barbs as he tests the insincerity of FB birthday wishes calling FB "a form of social lubrication that makes a mockery of everyone connected to it."  He changed his birthday three times during July to see if anyone noticed and by far he received three days of good wishes with just a few 'friends' recognizing his greed. (His birthday is really in January). http://www.slate.com/id/2300637/pagenum/all/#p2   Mr. Poltz's FB account is a work page so his 'friends' are mostly Slate readers, not real friends.  I did appreciate his point and his methods of proving it even if he is a bit of a curmudgeon.

I am not a FB malcontent.  As we star to some degree in our little reality shows by posting on FB, it does raise the question of what purpose is really being served here?  Many comments sighed with a shrug wondering what harm was being done to receive a pleasant "Happy Birthday."  "It's nice. It's gracious. It's low-key and civil," noted one reader.  Why squeeze a negative out of a simple good wish?

I think the Mad Hatter had the most original approach as he and his friends greeted Alice in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" by wishing her a very merry Un-Birthday. It's different yet sincere. And no one gets hurt - well at least not until the Queen of Hearts shows up but that is for another day - certainly not a birthday! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InSn2BLDwfQ

Electronic or Paper? Sync or Script

In our syncing world of electronic everything, I still use a paper calendar. 

There is no compelling reason behind the choice.  I've had an iPod for several years, a smartphone for one year and received a Kindle yesterday as a gift.  None of these devices came into my life out of necessity. They entered as either a birthday or Christmas present and, except for the new Kindle, as the song says, "they're second nature to me now."

My calendar, however, continues to be a pen and paper thing.

In her Sunday Times article "A Paper Calendar? It's 2011," Pamela Paul writes about leaving her paper personal organizer at work over a weekend, prompting some soul searching about life's anchors.  After a weekend of unsettling schedule ignorance, Sunday evening arrived with the the author also deprived of a look into her upcoming week. She offered this reflection: "I had nothing to worry about except what I didn't know I should be worrying about." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/fashion/calendar-wars-pit-electronics-against-paper.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=A%20paper%20calendar?%20it%22s%202011%22&st=cse

Not surprisingly Ms. Paul's reporting noted that colleagues who sync their personal and work calendars electronically, referenced paper calendar users as opting for a "horse and buggy" and "dinosaur" choice.  Their synchronized consolidation has merit if blending is what you seek. 

Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, studied 
work/life balance and states in the Times article, "People who merged their home and work keep all their keys on one chain and all their home and work commitments on one calendar."  She went further to investigate any affect this might have on privacy and concluded that while "it is a good way to break down the boundaries between different parts of your life," it equally challenged how to keep different slices of our lives apart.

I would love to offer well thought out reasons for keeping a paper calendar - some higher level of understanding and awareness that helps me maintain an individualized stance in the age of clouds, tablets, and all consuming friending. Alas, my only retort is, well, I like my paper calendar.  It has been my companion for almost 20 years.  Each December I purchase the new year of pages (yikes! not a green choice) and happily switch them three months at a time.  I find particular pleasure in viewing the month at a glance - life in one look. Every date also has some pithy quote (I read them all). A favorite, coincidentally from Ben Franklin upon whom the Franklin Covey name is built, resonates with the writer inside me struggling to gain some footing:

"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead,

either write things worth reading or do things worth writing." 

Days after I returned to work after having my first child in 1991, I found myself in a hotel meeting room with a hundred or so colleagues for a full day of training on using the corporate adopted Franklin Covey system.  Imagine! An entire day to learn how to plan and organize a calendar - all paper!  It seems unreal now.  Today Franklin Covey naturally offers multiple software versions of its systems.  The only change I've made is to downsize from the hefty classic planner to a pocket sized version.  My leather, deep burgundy, organizer is a small bundle of scratched softness with a snap that still works. 

And it does not crash.  The only error is human if I lose it.

Just to cement my uncool calendar attachment, I have kept several months-at-a-glance pages from over the years.  They are, in the spirit of A Christmas Carol, the ghosts of events past and they give me an odd sense of comfort.  I realize this "keeping" is all possible in the digital form but it does not speak to me.  I can't defend or explain my paper preference.   

Excuse me now while I figure out how the paperless world of Kindle works. Don't get me started on changing to ebooks.   

How about you? Paper or Electronic?   

Heads Up!

I was recently walking on a college campus in the lingering warmth of a pre-dusk Indian summer evening and noticed how the edges of everything seemed to soften in the sun's late-day glow. The moment felt like neither summer nor autumn - it seemed to be the best of both seasons.  Students were emerging from their late day classes and I wondered if they noticed the glimmering sight in front of them as what Jon Stewart might characterize as a "moment of Zen." 

 

The first few people were walking briskly, heads down, texting.  Then a couple passed me, each talking on their respective phones, heads down.  Two coeds came next, heads down, texting and holding a conversation (the skill sets involved here impressed me mightily).  I began to count how many people I walked past who were on their phones and stopped at fourteen. No one - not one soul - was looking up.  Now the students were emerging from classes that run two-and-a half hours long so being incommunicado for that period of time has its drawbacks.  I understand that people were plugging back into their non-academic lives. I do the same thing. 

When we use the phrase "to give someone a heads up" it's a physical direction for a non-physical action.  It invokes the physical act of actually looking up and being aware but it is for something not at all physical.  Its counterpart -"heads down" - prompts me to recall first grade when my teacher would instruct us to rest our heads on our desks as sort of timeout. On that warm September evening I wanted to announce a heads up to all the heads down.  In the age of instant communication, are we ironically missing what is going on around us?


Last Saturday, when Delta Airlines Flight 4951 from Atlanta made an emergency landing at New York's Kennedy International Airport, two young passengers decided to video their view of the harrowing landing using their phones.  In that moment of "will we make or not?" the two men chose to be uber-aware of their surroundings and capture it with seemingly little regard to the possible outcome. On one of the videos, the flight attendant's persistent and commanding reiteration of "Heads Down! Stay Down!" made me almost want to comply with the direction as I sat at my desk watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMaps7aBI6E


For forty-five seconds the flight attendant barks that dual command fifteen times - yet the amateur videographer continues to secure the view from the jet window of the sparking wing as it scrapes the runway. As the plane successfully lands without incident and the cabin erupts into applause, I clapped along and then thought "what were these guys thinking?"  This is an awareness that boggles my mind!


In her Salon.com article, Mary Elizabeth Williams suggests the pair of twenty-somethings were simply following a generation's ingrained need to get the image.  She writes, "Perhaps part of the explanation for (their) choice is that they belong to a generation accustomed to regular self-documentation. There's an entire population that photographs and tweets whatever is on the dinner plate in front of them. A plane crash? That's considerably more interesting." http://www.salon.com/life/internet_culture/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/09/28/delta_flight_4951_video

Are we ever, really living in the moment? When we are documenting the moment, does that diminish the experience even just a hair because we are thinking about how it will look or sound instead of being completely immersed in it?  Did the Delta passengers who had their heads down have the full experience of uncertainty as they considered a possible fiery landing while the passenger taking the video experienced a sliver of distraction in his need to get the images on his phone? In my final moments, do I want to be thinking of how this will possibly look to the folks at home?


When Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger miraculously landed his jetliner in New York City's Hudson River in January 2009, I don't recall seeing any videos taken from inside the plane. Having never (and hopefully will never) had the experience of a crash or near-crash landing, I can only speculate on the reasons why no one inside the aircraft taped a passenger's-eye view of the watery landing.  I feel certain all of those passengers were most definitely living in that moment. 

Twitter's website proclaims that its social networking and micro blogging service "is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now." To somewhat paraphrase actress Betty White, I am not on 'The Twitter,' but the pull and tug of documenting what is "right now" keeps me guessing how we can be here and now if we are doing something that puts a sort of thin scrim between what is happening and recording it for posterity.

Kodak's tagline "Share Moments. Share Life." is one I have bought into for much of my life.  Taking photographs, keeping mementos, documenting the breadth of experiences with family and friends has been an activity I have happily embraced.  I wonder now, though, how much I may have missed because I was too busy capturing the moment?  Each 'miss' is probably slight but add up a lifetime of pointing and shooting images from innumerable moments and it gives me pause. 

Wartime photographers deal with this on such searingly dramatic level.  When faced with a situation in which human suffering screams for help and the photographer continues to capture the images, where is the line drawn between being in the moment and being a human being? 
 

My late summer stroll along a college campus walkway certainly did not bring up images of wartime photography, but it did raise the simpler question - are we replacing the experience of real moments with a seemingly insatiable appetite for documenting them?  Are we truly looking at what is right in front of us?  Heads up everyone-what do you see?