I missed most of it because it was on too late. School nights, you know. But on Friday nights, I could stay up late and watch The Dick Cavett Show. For me, it’s the canonical example of the talk show.
There were only three television networks back then, and no way to time shift. While popular culture didn’t have the diversity we experience today, there was a tremendous concentration of audience. The limited number of outlets meant there was some obligation to represent the variety of our culture. Cavett faced the impossible task of going up against Carson for 90 minutes five nights a week. His audience was around 3.4 million to Carson’s 7.7 million. These shows were large hubs, connectors, big distributors of cultural information.
When the new currents of the rock culture made an appearance on mainstream television, more than show biz chat was communicated. The strangeness is palpable, and you can see the bold strokes of something new emerging.
And while we think of the coverage of our culture unfolding in real time: in 1969, the day after the three day concert called Woodstock, Cavett had a number of the musicians on his show. I’m trying to imagine if there could be an equivalent today. Stephen Stills still had mud on his jeans.
The natural reaction to the acceleration of our daily lives is to yearn for simpler days, simpler times. This is a train of thought inspired by reading John Thackara’sIn The Bubble, Designing in a Complex World mixed with listening to Steve Gillmor’s NewsGang Live. In the 1960s there were a number of movements organized to try and get back to the land. Even as the guitar solos became faster and more electric, there was a countervailing movement toward ecology, natural foods and dropping out of the rat race.
As the conversation jumps from the Network’s current supersonic speed to a discussion of real time, there’s an understandable backlash against the idea of always on, always connected and being flooded with information in real time. The naysayers moan that increasing the speed of information to real time will only make things worse. As it is, no one has enough time to sort through the things crying for our attention.
When we talk about the speed of daily life, we’re talking about the number of tasks that need to be completed in a day. By doing these tasks faster, and by finding shorter tasks, we can cram more and more into each day. As more things become available to consume and sort through, we’ll need to get even faster just to keep up.
We’ve become hunter/gatherers filtering the incoming streams looking for nutritious information. But the idea that there’s an infinite number of valuable things waiting for your consumption has always been true. Decisions and priorities have always been the key. It just seems like it’s easier to turn on the fire hose of information these days. A well-stocked library probably has the same potential– each book is a stream of words printed into a folio.
There’s another way to look at the idea of real time. We’ve been thinking of it as a faster sort of clock time; clocks are the basis of speed. But real time also connects to event time, the flow of things that happen during a day. Real time is the time in which a conversation unfolds. We tend to think of the emergency uses of real time — a cry for help and a response of aid. Emergencies are one kind of event, but there are many ways of conversing. Real time can be quite slow… the thoughtful pause before an answer; the interlude of laughter for a well-timed joke; a silence that washes over us as our conversation sinks in and resonates.
Perhaps we don’t notice that the speedy machines of the Network don’t move at the speed of life. They don’t have a sense of the fluidity of time. And the speed we want, is not an acceleration of the heartbeats we have remaining, but rather a speed that results in efficiency and spending less time at our chores. When you imagine the real time web, take a moment and think: what’s the music playing in your head?
Often we like to look to the logic of an innovation to determine whether or not it will succeed. Perhaps instead, we should look to the music of an innovation. In the story below, ideas are transformed into tones to shelter them from the rough transit into the flow of time. Nietzsche’s Innovator seeks first to reach the ear and the heart, not the brain. The determining factor of survival is not truth or error, open or closed, logical or nonsensical— but whether a seedling can be planted and survive the rigors of natural selection. The Innovator speaking of his creation says: “…a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.”
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.
– Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
By welcoming “storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness,” the Innovator embraces change and the possibility of failure. It’s not enough for an innovation to be spun into the friction-less space of the mind, it must be planted in the soil and given the chance to grow.
Music and innovation are mixed together in the practice of design thinking. Imagine Apple’s products without the music of their design. Although music should not be confused with beauty. As the economy tightens, standing next to the next generation of innovative products, we’ll be on the look out for the Music Man, the Pied Piper and the next singer-songwriter.
“I am thirsting for a composer,” said an innovator to his disciple, “who would learn my ideas from me and transpose them into his language; that way, I should reach men’s ears and hearts far better. With music one can seduce men to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?” “Then you would like to be considered irrefutable?” said his disciple.
The innovator replied: “I wish for the seedling to become a tree. For doctrine to become a tree, it has to be believed for a good while; for it to be believed, it has to be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness to reveal the nature and strength of the seedling; let it break if it is not strong enough. But a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.
When he had said that, his disciple cried impetuously: “But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.”
The innovator laughed in his heart and wagged a finger at him. “This kind of discipleship,” he said then, ” is the best; but it is also the most dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can endure it.”
We seem to be drawn to the idea of origins, like a moth to the flame. It’s as though by understanding the beginning, one could make sense of all that occurred from that point to this.
Ellen Ullman wrote a beautiful new year’s day piece called ‘My Secret Life‘ for the New York Times. In it she embraces the mystery of her origins. The records of her adoption are sealed.
The woman on the phone said, “Those records are sealed.� I said, “I know I can’t see what’s in them, but can I find out the date from which I couldn’t see what’s in them?� She replied, “Even the outsides of the records are sealed� — a confounding statement, as I envisioned envelopes surrounding envelopes, all sealed into infinity.
As Ullman points out in her piece, it’s through ‘the miracle of natural genetic recombination that each child is conceived as a unique being.’ It’s the difference at the point of origin that allows life to grow and prosper. Difference is at the heart of what allows any species to adapt to our changing environment.
I got to know Ullman’s writing through her excellent novel called ‘The Bug,’ which describes the world of writing computer programs. Her book ‘Close to the Machine‘ is a thoughtful exploration of the relationship between humans and computers. Also, check out this conversation with Jon Udell.
The longing for origins is a longing to belong. Perhaps it’s tribal, through a direct linkage to the tribe, we believe the paths of our ancestors will be revealed, and that we can trace their footsteps. Ullman imagines being raised by ‘word-eaters’ (instead of computer scientists and mathematicians).
Locating origins seems to be an answer to the question of becoming–and what will become of us. But while you can draw a line from that first fixed point to your last heartbeat. The next heartbeat is entirely mysterious and unpredictable.
