Frank Beacham's Journal

Information Without Knowledge

Information everywhere. We are drowning in it. We are assured that information is wealth. To succeed in the new economy, we are told, we must be connected.

Why then—with so much information—are we in an age of such unenlightenment? Why is virtually any idea of substance "dumbed down" for public consumption? Why is instant gratification so important to so many of us?

Easy access to information, it would seem on the surface, should be leading to a better educated, more knowledgeable population. So why is it that as information technology improves, most people move down, not up, the knowledge chain?

Some answers to these questions emerged from a symposium where a group of major American artists tried to grapple with creative issues facing them in the age of digital media. The session, called "Digital Expression," was held at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Peter Sellars, a director of theater, opera and film, offered some insight on modern information overload.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information easily available, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful to the recipient.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something.

"Now we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it," Sellars continued. "Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered today. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips but we don't value anything."

Unlike some others attending the symposium, Sellars embraced the "untamed quality" of the current Internet structure because it allows the user to wander and discover information through his or her own personal experience. 

"To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," Sellars said. "To have the user making wrong turns through the information is exactly the point. That's where the juice is."

Today's mass media, said Sellars, reflects only a single voice, not the broad range of human experience. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized. A very narrow group of people are creating this insane (communications) gridlock," he said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Artists, he said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience," said Sellars. "As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

The issue of experience was also addressed by the actress Jane Alexander.  She embraced information technology as an important artist's tool but was clearly troubled by those who would use it as a substitute for experiencing reality.

"Seeing the Mona Lisa on a compact disc is not the same as seeing the real thing," she said. "Hearing 'If I Had A Hammer' on your computer speakers is not the same as hearing Pete Seeger singing it. There is no way to actually create live theater in a box or a game.

"The whole point about virtual reality is that it is virtually real, not really real," Alexander continued. "Technology cannot replace the seeing, the hearing and the experiencing of art. It doesn't replicate the doing of art. There's a big difference between a paint brush and a canvas and a mouse and a screen."

Perhaps one of the significant lessons we'll one day learn from this computer era is that information should never be confused with knowledge. Having instant access to all the world's databanks has little to do with genuine cultural progress.

Despite all the information age hype, the real information—the information that matters in life—comes only when we as human beings are ready to open ourselves to accept it. For most of us, this comes through living life, acquiring personal experience and searching for knowledge out of genuine curiosity.

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(I wrote this column in October of 1994. I was reminded of it last night in a discussion about younger people who often use the Internet to substitute information (say from Wikipedia) for genuine knowledge. When I re-read it, it seemed as timely as ever. When it was written, Jane Alexander was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Steve Jobs Is a One-of-a-Kind Genius Very Rare in Today's World

When 20-something tech “journalists” tell you Apple Computer will be just fine without Steve Jobs, don’t believe a word they say. They know nothing. We lived through the period when John Sculley and Gil Amelio ran Apple, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

Most corporations today are run by committees of lame—sometimes stupid—people. Most MBA-era executives are constantly fearful with little real instinct about how to make anything—much less brilliant products that people want. They always worry about the bottom line.

Steve Jobs was never like them. He is an original thinker with a singular instinct for the next great thing. Apple has never done focus groups. Jobs goes by his gut instincts and is usually right.

In an interview Jobs once said that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." That statement was not a joke. It’s perhaps a dirty little secret today that psychedelic drugs pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by demonstrating that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. It was not like the government told you.

Steve Jobs could take one look at Microsoft and know exactly what was wrong. “They just have no taste,” he told PBS in 1996. “And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

A year later, Jobs added to the New York Times that Microsoft’s products suck. “There’s no sex in them anymore.”

After suffering through what passed as personal computers in the early 1980s, I was elated when Jobs announced the Macintosh in 1984. I bought an original Mac and haven’t looked back. It changed my life. It allowed me to make a living without working for a corporation. As Jobs once said, it was the equivalent of “a bicycle for our minds.”

When Jobs left Apple after being axed by John Sculley, the company entered dark times. But what would one expect from a computer company being run by former a Pepsi Cola salesman? It went on this way until Jobs came back and started introducing his “next insanely great things.”

Not only have I been an avid Apple user since the first Mac, I’ve also covered Apple for years as a reporter. I have interviewed all the former presidents of Apple, including Steve Jobs. I have watched Jobs repeatedly enchant audiences with his amazing keynote addresses, and smiled knowingly as Jobs used the music of our kindred spirit Bob Dylan to open and close those sessions. 

Jobs was always driven by far more than money. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me,” he once said. “Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.” How many modern CEOs would admit that?

I would like to think that Apple could continue to function as the genius company that it has been. But I know better. It will return to Earth, especially when it’s time to invent that next great thing. Real genius is very, very rare—especially in today’s world. Steve Jobs has it, while others don’t. It’s a sad fact that geniuses like him come very rarely.

Jobs has the moral compass of a man who came of age in the 60s. It’s a proud legacy, and one I understand and admire. Others might learn from it, if they only could.

  Myself and Tamara Ball, my assistant, in late 1984, at Television Matrix in Hollwood, CA. That's a vintage Apple Lisa, upgraded to a Macintosh, between us.

Leon Theremin's Magical Sounds

In Asheville, North Carolina, more than 60 bands have gathered for the three-day Moogfest—a music festival celebrating the life and inventions of Robert A, Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Moog died in 2005, leaving a serious legacy in the music world.

In October, 1994, I first met Moog at the New York Film Festival as I watched an extraordinary documentary by Steven M. Martin about the creation of the world's first electronic musical instrument. Billed as part biography, part social history and part detective story, the film—Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey—told the remarkable story of Leon Theremin, a Russian-born inventor whose adventures spanned the avant garde music world in New York City in the 1920s to the clandestine world of the KGB in the 1930s and 40s.

The theremin caught the imagination of Robert Moog, who started building the instruments as a teenager and began to manufacture them again for sale in 1954. A decade later Moog made music history when he invented his synthesizer, the first in a successful line of electronic music synthesizers.

This is the story of an invention with which Moog is not normally associated. In 1922, Leon Theremin demonstrated an early version of his strange new music machine for Nikolai Lenin, the U.S.S.R.'s leader. Five years later, he played his instrument for a group of American VIPs in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It was received into America's Jazz Age culture with awe and excitement.

The original theremin (pictured at the top) resembled a wooden speakers' podium with a loop of metal extending from one side and a vertical metal antenna on the other. It was a real curiosity in the early radio days. Audiences were mesmerized by the new breed of instrument whose music was generated not from physical contact but from hand movements made in the air around the two protruding antennas.

By controlling the pitch with the right hand and the volume with the left, it was possible to create music that suggests—as the New York Times put it—“a violin or a soprano or a Martian making a landing. It is surpassingly strange."

For about two years beginning in 1929, RCA manufactured and sold 500 theremins. From 1930 until his mysterious disappearance in 1938, Leon Theremin built the instruments for customers in his New York studio on West 54th Street.

That disappearance makes the Theremin legend even more strange and fascinating. The inventor was apparently kidnapped by Soviet agents from his New York establishment and taken to Russia where, after a period of imprisonment, he was engaged by the government to design electronic eavesdropping technology for spies in World War II.

Long assumed dead in the West (a German newspaper reported his demise), he was spotted by chance one day at the Moscow Conservatory of Music by a visiting reporter for the New York Times. This led to his emotional return to the United States in 1991 (an event portrayed in the film).

Whether we realize it or not, most of us are familiar with the wavering vibrato sound of the theremin from dozens of 1950's-era science fiction and horror movies. Films like Spellbound, The Lost Weekend and The Day the Earth Stood Still used theremins on their soundtracks. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations is perhaps the best known use of a theremin in a pop music recording.

Robert Moog continued to make theremins in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina until his death. Taking advantage of the explosion of new interest in theremins since the release of the film, Moog introduced an affordable Theremin called the Etherwave. It's was a no compromise, fully professional instrument that emulated the tone color and playing characteristics of Theremin's original. 

Nostalgic for the old Heathkit days and fascinated by the idea of owning such an oddball instrument, I purchased an Etherwave kit from Moog. It came with an unfinished wood cabinet, nickel-plated brass antennas, a pre-assembled circuit card, a power supply and several bags of parts. Also included is an instructional video and a CD of theremin music by the inventor's protégé, Clara Rockmore, who performed at the screening. 

As with Heathkits, Moog didn’t let you fail.The Etherwave Theremin worked perfectly when I first turned on the power switch. If you use reasonable care in assembly, it is pretty much a foolproof project.

When I finished the kit, I asked Moog if he could explain why such a cult-like following has developed around this instrument—with more 50 professional musical acts using theremins in performance throughout the world.

Several factors, Moog speculated, contributed to its appeal. "For one thing the instrument is responsive," he said. "With a keyboard you put your finger on a key and the note plays. That's it. This is just the opposite. The note keeps changing with every single motion of your hand. People like that. They enjoy that responsiveness.

"Another part of it," he continued, "is that's all in the air. There's something ethereal about that. Something gossamer. Back in the earlier days it was an elitist thing. It was rather sensational but there were very few people who actually got up and played it. Now that's changed. It's much better established now than in the past. People are engrossed in it. It's almost a cult thing."

In 1993, Leon Theremin died in Moscow at the age of 97. Both he and Robert Moog lived to see the popular revival of his very special instrument. Moog’s company, now called Moog Music, still sells the Etherwave Theremin kit for $359.  Go to www.moogmusic.com/.

Bobby Alt with the Street Drum Corps perform with a theremin.

Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms

 

Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms. 

Those words, the celebratory motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, expressed a revealing truth that by today’s standards is shocking in its honesty. 

The arguments over technology today never suggest that human conformity is part of the high-tech transaction. Personal “empowerment” is the buzzword from the technology merchants. Technology makes us more powerful and gives us greater personal freedom, the spiel goes.

BP, with its massive oil spill in the Gulf; Wall Street, with its devastating computer-generated “derivatives;” and the continuing assault on our personal privacy by Internet companies should have permanently nipped those ideas in the bud.  

Sadly, most Americans are now feeling helpless, learning they have to play along to get along in this brave new world dominated by global networks and out-of-control corporations. In a society that lives and breathes on speeding fixes of “information,” we feel more disconnected than ever before.

In his 1991 book, In the Absence of the Sacred  (Sierra Club Books), author Jerry Mander warned this would happen. He described how individual technologies would expand their impact, interlock and merge with one another. “Together, they are forming something new, almost as if they were living cells; they are becoming a single technical-economic web encircling the plant...,” Mander wrote.  He called this phenomenon “megatechnology.”  

 

Mander put in stark terms what we are facing today. He offered insight into why Americans are so susceptible to the charms of new technology while failing to recognize the dangers that lurk beneath the surface.

In our culture, Mander notes, new technology comes only from a single source: the corporation. The one and only reason a corporation introduces a new technology is to make a profit. The marketing goal of the corporation is—by any means necessary—to persuade us to “conform” to their latest technology. Once we accept and embrace a new technology as part of our life, the corporation reaps the reward of immense wealth.

The new toys of the digital age are being presented as hip, sexy and glamorous. There are always good reasons to go along. Since it’s so obvious that technology makes our daily lives easier and more fun, we find easy justification to buy in.  Why not accept it, use it and go with the flow?

What we often forget in the swirl of hype is that every technology is a two-edged sword. Mander notes that new technology is always introduced in its best light. All emphasis is on the benefits. During the sales pitch, the negative effects are hidden. Only after the technology becomes embedded in our daily lives do we begin to understand the tradeoffs we have made in embracing it. There is no better example than what's happening in the Gulf.

All this is a very deceptive business. Everyone can cite the benefits of certain technologies. We tend to take a narrow view and think of technology on a purely personal level.  Only by adopting a wider view—one that encompasses an examination of how technology works as a whole—can we get an accurate assessment of the true impact a technology is having on our way of living.

When taking a wider view of technology it becomes clear that most of us are already surrounded by a tangled web of interrelated technologies that make up our living environment. We live and work in a manufactured bubble of air conditioned apartments, offices, malls, automobiles and airplanes. Urban dwellers move about on paved sidewalks and roadways, encountering “nature” only in landscaped parks. We are dependent on electric lights, telephones, computers and a myriad of appliances that are, in turn, all dependent on fossil fuels for energy.

We live inside technology. We exist in an artificial world totally created by humans and increasingly disconnected from all that is natural. Because of its physical comfort and illusions of security, humans easily adapt to this controlled environment. Unfortunately, once inside this artificial cocoon, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to accurately detect and assess the effects of technology on our world. 

Those effects do exist because every technology has a bias and carries an inherent message. No technology is value-free. There are social and political implications inherent in the introduction of every new technology. New technologies change power arrangements and force conformity. After the introduction, there are always winners and losers. 

Yet, saying “no” to new technology is a foreign idea to most Americans. Even public debate of the social implications of a new technology is rare in our culture. Few of us consider that we have the right to prevent the deployment of a new technology that might negatively affect our lives. 

As Mander suggests in his book, the ability to question and evaluate new technology is an important survival skill.  Only by moving beyond the commercial propaganda associated with new technology introductions can one begin to cut through the distortions and define the tradeoffs in accepting a new technology. It is important to identify and examine the social, political and environmental consequences of technologies currently being deployed throughout the world. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal on July 16, 1845: “Men have become the tools of their tools...” Only by beginning to question technology can we reverse the trend of conforming to it. 

 

(Photo credits: Top photo of the beach at Waveland, Mississippi by Sabrina Bradford. Bottom photo by Ellis Anderson)

iPad: The World's First Multimedia Storytelling Machine

 

As a writer, I tend to work with compelling stories over many years. In addition to words, I have always collected images—still, video and motion picture film—along with recorded audio. It has always been my future hope to create multimedia stories—using words, images and sound. Now, after decades, that day may have arrived.

Last Friday, I received a new iPad from Apple. It had caught my eye due to demonstrations I had seen showing remarkable multimedia books. Now that I have used the iPad a little, I can say it is on its way to being a truly revolutionary publishing device. Not yet, but it's headed there.

A text version of my latest book, Whitewash, was available from the iPad’s bookstore from day one. But it’s only standard text. I’m now just beginning to explore ways to incorporate other media into the book. So far, there are no easy authoring tools for individuals. That, I assume, is coming. (In the meantime, I'm looking for help.)

The iPad marks a turning point, however, where multimedia books are finally possible for distribution to the masses. It’s a day I’ve been waiting for a long, long time.

"Multimedia" is the New Mantra

I went to PhotoPlus Expo in New York City last week in an attempt to get a handle on “what’s new” in photography. Oh man, did I get an earful! First of all, many photographers -- including Pulitzer Prize winners -- are now out of a job. This creative “depression” that we’re in has cut a wide swath, even the top talent at most newspapers.

Traditional photography businesses are drying up. Most of the best and brightest in photography -- like other fields -- are reinventing themselves and the way they operate. Photojournalism has been replaced by a new buzzword: “multimedia.” That’s a form of digital storytelling that combines photography with video, audio, graphics and the written word. 

Unfortunately, most “multimedia” looks a lot like well-produced television news, if you can find it anymore. As one who learned most of the elements of multimedia before the word was ever formed, I was somewhat amused (or was it depressed?) hearing a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer talk about the basics of audio. This photographer had taken four days (not including editing) to shoot a “multimedia” piece that a good television crew would have done in a day.

When I asked how the photographer would get paid for such work, the answer was businesses will pay for multimedia. Interesting answer, since in recent days it's my personal experience that most businesses will pay for virtually nothing. Especially high-priced video. Most want $50 YouTube videos!

That said, it was also interesting that the photographer did the entire piece with a high-end Canon DSLR still camera. Perhaps that’s why it took so long. Though both Canon and Nikon have added video capability to most of their DSLR cameras, none make the production process easier. 

Photography, and its equipment makers, are trying to become something else. But they are not exactly sure what it is yet. As they try to cram video capability into still cameras, one wonders exactly what they are thinking? At least, companies like RED Camera, are thinking of a process in the design of new cameras. One doesn’t get that impression from Canon or Nikon.  

A RED camera. This is a company designing hybrid still/video cameras with a future vision of process.  One doesn't get that feeling from Canon or Nikon

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All of this hodgepodge of activity made me realize more than ever what an interesting time creative people live in. Our livelihoods gone, we — even Pulitzer Prize winners -- are having to reinvent ourselves. We are all dabbling in new areas outside our expertise trying to piece something together.  

On one level it is very exciting, while on another it is downright frightening. But one thing is nice. The playing field has been leveled for everyone. There are few “experts” about media these days. A Pulitzer Prize at a newspaper won’t buy you a cup of coffee in this new era. Anyone can win, and anyone can lose. It’s the new lottery.