Twitter: Having a Loud Conversation

Many years ago, Dave introduced me to Twitter. Dave is amazingly astute in his ability to spot the trends in the techie world. He told me about Flickr before it was cool, and then Twitter way before it was cool.

I have to admit, I didn't get Twitter. Why on Earth would I tweet about whatever I'm doing. Twitter, honestly, didn't really take off until celebs like Shaq and Ashton Kutcher discovered it was a way to get media attention without going directly to the media.

But that doesn't explain its appeal to the average Joe. The fact of the matter is this. Today's generation of kids, that is, generation Y, the millenial generation, has a "pay attention to me" mentality. 1984 posited a world where "Big Brother" spied your every move under the presumption that you, average citizen, had something to hide and valued that thing you called privacy.

George Orwell might be shocked to see how many people would give their privacy up for a bit of attention. But then, he was a writer who needed attention to get paid, so maybe he could relate.

For non-celebs, Twitter is a conversation in a restaurant, where you're the loudest table in the building. Hi, xxx, how's it going, as you yell to the next table. It's as much name-dropping as well. Sometimes it's a matter of who you tweet to, and who will respond that matters. I've tweeted to folks who have "blocked" me because I'm not cool enough. All in a day's work. All in a day's work!

The point is: why have these public conversations? It's a bit self-indulgent and I say that even as I do it myself. I tweet in the hopes that some random minor celeb way notice and respond. I am that groupie that screams when Justin B brushes his hands through his hair (does he even do this? Not a groupie, I assure you).

People criticize tweeters as having boring lives not worth reading about, but it is a cry from the unattended, who want, so very desperately, to be celebs too.

Rewatching "The History Boys"

I just watched "The History Boys" on television. There are, I suppose, quite a few flaws in the film. The central conceit, that a portly history teacher with a fondness for giving rides on his motorcycles to his male students and then reaching for a grope during opportune moments, with the grudging acceptance of the boys might be offensive. A reviewer has noted what would happen if it had been an all-girls school. Would there not be outrage?

The eponymous "history boys" from which the film gets its names are from a British boarding school of all-male students. It appears to be 1980s England. The headmaster, balding and unimaginative, has one goal in mind, which is to get as many boys into Oxbridge as possible, and to this end, he's hired Irwin, himself an Oxford man, to coach the boys into writing clever essays that will draw the attention of the readers that admit these men into higher education.

The previous time or times I watched this, I was not teaching, so I didn't think of the film from a teacher's perspective. There is a strong streak of idealism in the film. The kids, with perhaps the exception of the jockish Rudge, all seem committed to their studies. In discussions, they challenge the teachers. When Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, shows up, he offers an alternative view of history than Hector.

Hector is the idealist. He wants students engaged in history because he has a passion for literature. He finds truth in the fiction stories of the great masters. But, he also doesn't want the reverence to literature to overwhelm the students with too great a level of respect. So, he has the students singing songs from musicals and watching classic movies, to make those stories, mass-appealing as they may be, as relevant as the classics.

Irwin, by contrast, is the pragmatist. He sees admission as a game. While his students are technically proficient--they know their history backwards and forwards, their essays are fact-filled and parrot back the books they've read. He challenges them to bring an unusual perspective, to make the essays interesting. The history boys seem keen on this, even as Hector bristles at the notion of history as game.

Mrs. Lintott provides the female voice of reason, counterbalancing the foibles of Hector who, despite his love of teaching, can't seem to abandon his infatuation for his students, with one notable exception.

If the movie uses Dakin as the ultra-hip guy who sleeps with secretaries and seems more than plenty bi-curious, it is Posner, the gay Jewish geek, who is the moral center of the film. Posner knows he has a crush on Dakin, and even Dakin knows this too. Dakin's a bit too cool to get involved, and he feels Posner is a bit too young.

There are perhaps three key scenes in the film. First, Posner has a discussion with Irwin and says that he is homosexual and that he has a crush on Dakin and he knows it can't be returned. In a way, this confession is about Posner, but it is also about Irwin. Irwin wants to sympathize, but he's afraid to reveal who he truly is to Posner, mostly out of deference to the teacher-student relationship. Posner has another discussion with Hector about a story he's read and Hector tells him that novels are compelling because sometimes you have a feeling, one you think is completely personal, and realize that such a feeling is there in written word by a man you've never met, and perhaps by someone long since dead.

Another key scene is Irwin and Hector talking in the hallway shortly after Hector has been told he's being let go because of his indiscretions. Indeed, Mrs. Lintott seems to feel that those indiscretions, as poor judgment as they may be, are perhaps not as severe as they could be, that as a teacher that cares about what he teaches, his contributions to a student's development more than offsets bad behavior. Hector understands that Irwin himself is attracted to the boys and even as the boys think of Irwin as cooler, he advises Irwin to restrain himself, in particular, in his infatuation with Dakin.

To up the ante, Dakin wants to fool around with Irwin, especially after he has found out (like many of his classmates) that he's going to a top-notch college. It's his way of saying thanks. Irwin is uncomfortable at the advances, and eventually gives in to the idea of meeting Dakin. This discomfort is well-acted even if the situation is contrived, but it does touch on potential situations a teacher might find him/herself.

I'll quickly go over the other guys. Akhtar is an Indian Muslim. His character is not fleshed out that much and his inclusion probably says as much about modern British society's diversity than anything else. James Corden plays portly Timms, but is also a character that isn't that well-developed. He's there as the token big guy. Apparently, the actor has gone on to be in a successful British sitcom.

Russell Tovey plays Rudge, the athlete. In a way, his view is the most honest. He doesn't care for book learning at all, despite being in a prep school. He plays the game somewhat, but thinks it's a waste of time. He dislikes the guile needed, and just wants to play sports.

Andrew Knott plays Lockwood, who is not given much of a personality, and is there, one imagines, to be good looking. One other character is the token African Brit, and like Akhtar, doesn't have that much of a personality.

Jamie Parker plays Scripps. He's the Catholic, and is considered a bit of a cipher by best friend, Dakin, who wonders what Scripps does with all this religion. It does seem the writing is a touch lazy for Scripps, and his Catholicism is played, if not for laughs, than not entirely seriously either. His religion is a novelty to Dakin and the film treats it as such.

The two boys that matter most are Dakin and Posner. Dakin, confident and outgoing, ambitious and willing to take chances, and Posner, scared and timid, not sure how to deal with his sexuality, and having a hopeless crush on Dakin. Interestingly enough, Hector never gives Posner a ride, the one guy who might truly be interested in Hector's advances, while the others consider his advances more a nuisance. Hector probably senses how conflicted Posner is and doesn't want the aftermath of any encounter.

The accident that ends the movie is something of a convenience. Because Hector takes Irwin for a bike ride, one that ends in Hector's death and Irwin's injury, Irwin and Dakin never get together for Dakin to "thank" Irwin.

If the movie works, it works at many levels. From a teacher's perspective, it's the total engagement of the students. So often, students are disengaged. They wonder why they are in classes, and they are unable to formulate good questions, take decisive stances. It's a level of maturity few students, even after four years, ever reach. To find such precocity as the students in this film must make teachers giddily happy, even as they recognize the fantasy aspects.

When Hector is going to be let go, he wants to make an announcement to his class, but the boys are trying to be clever and Hector is unable to get his pending firing out in words, and breaks down and cries, realizing the only thing he truly cared about--teaching, was going to be taken away from him. Mrs. Lintott is sympathetic. She sees the headmaster as a bean-counter, one who only worries about placements and test scores, and not about educating the person.

Although the film isn't strictly about Posner, his story is the link between Hector, Irwin, and the history boys. All three are gay. All three find hurt as they suppress their feelings (in a way, the film is old-fashioned, never seeming to take the viable stance that these people might find someone who is also gay to make them happy), infatuated by straight guys, and never able to find a relationship that works.

Of all the history boys, he is most like Hector, and becomes a teacher. And like Hector, he is fond of the boys he teaches, but he restrains himself, and as much as it hurts, he says he's not unhappy either. In a way, the film touches two aspects of teaching. One is the act of teaching itself, the inspiration and engagement to intellectual pursuits, and one is more the seedy underside, the idea that a teacher is in a position of respect and that students are at a challenging time in their lives and may be victims of untoward advances.

For its variety of flaws, so much of the film resonates, from its decidedly too-brainy kids, to the different views of how to teach students, to that idyllic time in life somewhere between high school and college where students are only asked to hang out and learn, and the responsibilities of a job seem so far away.

The Reality of The Social Network

When it comes to making a movie, film makers have some idea of what makes a movie work. They need drama, that is, they need tension. They need easy-to-understand motivations. They don't need things that are highly technical or highly abstruse. Such things would only put the audience to sleep with nary a sense of the deep issues that they are completely missing.

Facebook started with Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is, like most endeavors, it's too tough to write code on your own. As prolific as Zuckerberg might be, he can only code so fast, and he eventually needs a team that he can trust to do things. The story of Dustin Moskovitz (shown in the picture) and Chris Hughes are untold because, frankly, it's more interesting to make this the story of a handful of people.

Thus, Eduardo Saverin, the business guy, is the guy that is the foil for Mark. Saverin is the conscious of the film, and yet, the film posits that he lacks the vision to make Facebook as successful as it could be, and eventually, either Zuckerberg or Parker or both chose to exclude Saverin (although apparently through lawsuits, he still owns a reasonable chunk of Facebook).

What about Moskovitz and Hughes? What about the other technical folks that were part of Facebook? How did Zuckerberg interact with them? Did they have a sense this could be big? Did they know what it would take to make Facebook big? What did they have that, say, MySpace didn't have? Why did it work? Ultimately, such questions are sidestepped because the answers are perhaps not so pat, not so simple. Was the success of Facebook due to its technical prowess, or was it due to something simpler? Perhaps having a good idea at the right time?

Facebook started a bit like GMail. It ran on exclusivity. But exclusivity isn't be enough. Zuckerberg had created other sites at Harvard and those sites would not have taken off the way Facebook did.

You need a reason to visit the site whether you are exclusive or not. It may be enough to bait the first few users, but honestly, that's far from enough. The site has to be good enough to keep folks coming back over and over. To be fair, many websites could have been great had they had enough users. They could have made great decisions, had there been enough people to start it up, and yet, there wasn't enough. Maybe HarvardConnection (or ConnectU) would have been great. But it's highly possible it would have fizzled.

The Social Network cared primarily about the relationship of Zuckerberg and Saverin and also to the Winklevoss twins (and Narendra). The technical team behind Facebook was mostly pushed aside because, as movie makers, Fincher and Sorkin would have been hard-pressed to make that side of the story compelling. And, did the folks who invented Facebook really understand what made it different and what made it work? Perhaps they did.

To me, the reason it worked was because it flipped the home page around. Instead of the home page being about you, it was about your friends. You could have 100 friends, but all you need is 3-5 really active friends to keep you coming back to Facebook. Once you could add comments or look at your friends pictures or what have you, you have motivation to keep coming back. If it was just about you, you would get bored of yourself. Other sites like MySpace failed to make it easy to notify you when your friends updated anything. It was a huge labor to find out what your friends were up to. And they took advantage of microblogging since real blogging was far too time-consuming.

So while I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed how Fincher/Sorkin told the tale, I know that it misses on a lot of the technical aspects that would have made it more interesting to me personally.

Review: The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, I didn't think much of it. The commercial didn't seem that good. I knew almost nothing of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. What little I knew was something about how Zuckerberg "stole" Facebook from the original creators and made a fortune. I had thought he had been the savvy business type, a Steve Jobs that took over from lowly Steve Wozniak.

But then I heard David Fincher directed the film and Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. David Fincher has been a notable director, even if his name is not as widely known as, say, Steven Spielberg. Until Fincher directed his first feature, he was best known as one of the directors of Madonna's video.

Fincher got his start in that incubator of talent: the Aliens films. The first had been directed by Ridley Scott, known for his visual style. The second was a hyper-kinetic space romp directed by James Cameron. Fincher helmed the third film and Jean-Pierre Jeunet did the fourth (he also did Amelie). Fincher got notoriety in that most gruesome of cop buddy movies: Se7en about a serial killer who murders based on the seven deadly sins.

Fincher went on to direct other movies like The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac. Fincher is a technician, a director whose cool precision sometimes draws attention to itself. There is a certain detachment, a little like watching a Kubrick film, although Fincher seems more assured in how he wants a scene to look.

I found it a bit puzzling what would draw Fincher to this story. It doesn't seem to follow his usual brand of film, whatever that may be. This is a story of geeks that develop a social networking site that takes over the world.

The story begins at Harvard where Zuckerberg is a computer science major. The opening scene, which is made up for dramatic effect, tries to set the tone for the entire film. In it, Zuckerberg is telling his girlfriend that he wants to join one of the elite houses at Harvard. It helps to know something about how Harvard works.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (I believe) have a house system. Typically, students enter their first year in the dorms, then they join a house where they will stay their remaining years. A house is perhaps more akin to Harry Potter's house of Griffyndor than, say, a fraternity. The house is co-ed and serves as residence, dining hall, and communal gathering place.

Beyond this basic living structure, there are also "final clubs" which are social clubs with eight all-male clubs and five all-female clubs. The all-male final clubs have been around for over a hundred years.

Zuckerberg wants to join such a club and tells his plan to his girlfriend. She seems intelligent. Both trade verbal jabs courtesy of Aaron Sorkin until it's revealed that this girlfriend goes to Boston University, and Zuckerberg has ambitions to work his way up the social hierarchy. He's dumped when she feels it's too much of a burden being his girlfriend and that he's basically an asshole.

Without this opening exchange, it's hard to read much into Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. Looking much like Michael Cera, he lacks Cera's huggable loser quality, but has enough of his geek to make it plausible that this guy could be the programming genius that starts Facebook.

Indeed, Eisenberg's face rarely registers any emotions. He never seems ecstatic, nor sad. His emotions are expressed more through words and he seems a bit emotionally detached, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, and yet, Zuckerberg is ambitious.

Although Facebook's creation is the result of computer programming, Fincher and Sorkin only touch on that aspect. They find enough computer consultants to keep certain parts reasonably accurate. Zuckerberg is shown blogging on LiveJournal. You can see his screen is filled with HTML, although of the most rudimentary sort. LiveJournal likely has a way to edit raw HTML, but most people don't use it (because they don't understand it), and one wonders if Zuckerberg would have edited raw HTML, because there's a bit of tedium to it. Even so, there's some accuracy to this.

There is some historical research that was done to create some of the sense of the early 2000s. I bought my first Mac around 2001 or so. The earliest power cords were round and glowed at the connection, unlike the new magnetic version that allows the cord to slip off without breaking. They were able to find a Mac circa that era in the opening scene when Sean Parker is introduced (who is momentarily unrecognizable, despite being played by Justin Timberlake).

At one point, Zuckerberg says that he's going to fire up emacs and edit the Perl code, and it does indeed look like Perl code, at least, from a cursory glance. Emacs is one of two Unix text editors in wide use (the other being vi or its successor, vim). Zuckerberg talks about keeping the servers up as well.

To show some of Zuckerberg's genius, he is shown sitting in a computer hardware course as the teacher is explaining details of how paging is done though the quantities he uses (256 bytes for a page) seems small. To increase the melodrama, the class is only 15-20 students seated in an auditorium meant for 100. As Zuckerberg leaves the class early to deal with some business related issue, the teacher notes that many students have gave up on the course. As Zuckerberg leaves, he identifies bits of a status register. The teacher makes an inane comment "That's correct--do you see how he got this?", when the answer is "he memorized it". There was nothing to infer. The status register was the way it was defined by the person or people who designed it.

Since this is a plot-driven story, there is a need to prune away enough characters that might otherwise distract from the storyline. There are roughly four main characters other than Zuckerberg. Although Zuckerberg is an emotional cipher, the everyman that we're meant to relate to is his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, who provides the money to help Zuckerberg, but is put down, even as he makes inroads to join one of the "final club", Phoenix. Saverin is shown as a big supporter of Zuckerberg, and is distrustful of Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, who eventually helps Zuckerberg grow Facebook.

There is a kind of genius picking Justin Timberlake to play Sean Parker. Timberlake, a ex boy-band pop singing sensation, has shown some acting chops. He must have liked the idea of playing an uber geek, but one reason Timberlake may have been chosen is because of his star persona. He can then play Sean Parker not only as a geek, but a cool savvy coding rock star, someone that Zuckerberg becomes enamored of. Perhaps echoing Wall Street (a sequel came out recently too), Zuckerberg must pick between the guy who takes him places or his best friend, and while Zuckerberg does side with Parker, the film leaves it ambiguous about his final feelings to Saverin.

The other two main characters are the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, both played by Armie Hammer. They look something like Nordic gods, and yet Sorkin/Fincher do something clever. Since they are both at Harvard, they are made out to be pretty smart guys (at least business wise). They work with Divya Narendra (played by director Anthony Minghella's son who does not seem to be Indian). Furthermore, the brothers act differently. The leader (I guess Cameron) is more worried about appearances and seems the more patient of the two, and the other is more impulsive, similar to Divya.

Sorkin, in particular, has some fun about the two being twins, making them more "twin-like", i.e., about how they mention they are brothers, almost as if the twins in the second Matrix films had intelligent dialogue.

Roger Ebert, in his review, notes that nearly all the women (except the girlfriend at the beginning) are Asian. Although Zuckerberg is almost seen as being uninterested in women (and for dramatic purposes, he is shown trying to friend the girl that dumped him at the start of the film), his to-be-wife appears as two of the groupie Asian girls that make out with Eduardo and Mark. Fincher uses indirect cues to get his idea across. Zuckerberg is showing wearing the Adidas flip flops into the next stall over from Eduardo, the same one shown during the hearings that interweave through the entire film.

Rather than show Bill Gates in focus, he is shown blurred, wearing a sweater, and a voice impersonator does the talking so unless you're paying attention, you might not know that it's Bill Gates being portrayed (although it's mentioned in a subsequent scene).

Fincher knows he has some difficult material to try to dramatize, and to this effect, he falls on an interesting crutch: music. Many scenes have music over it to add drama to the situation. Fincher also adds tension by cross-cutting time frames, from a hearing, and going back historically.

Fincher employs tilt-shift in a key crew scene, one where the Winklevoss team starts to close on the winning boat, but ends up short. This is a metaphor for how close these jocks came to perhaps creating the next Facebook (though probably not really).

Ultimately, although there are a lot of geek aspects to The Social Network, it is about the desire to be a mover and a shaker in the world, and not about why Facebook ultimately worked.

There are two or three theories that are posited in the film. The Winklevosses mention the first reason: the Harvard name makes the desirability of the social network rather high. Second, there's the idea of putting the social status (single, etc) on. The one real reason isn't given. Facebook inverted what the home page was about.

In LiveJournal, each person's home page is their blog. In Facebook, the home page is basically a feed of all your friends. What keeps you coming back to Facebook isn't what you are doing, it's what your friends are doing. It seems obvious, but many social networking sites didn't get that. To be fair, Facebook looks sleek and clean and not the dirty, gaudy clutter of MySpace.

There are two aspects of Facebook that The Social Network avoids. It doesn't try to explain why Facebook is so addictive. It merely states that it is. It also doesn't get into the group that helped create Facebook. Most of the coders are only in the background. There is a competition (that most likely never existed) where coders must take shots as they try to hack in somewhere.

Even the parties that are portrayed are sexier than reality, done to jazz up the reality that was. We understand, as movie goers, that drama is amped so that viewers don't get bogged down by the day to day mundane details that reflect reality. Zuckerberg is likely a far more personable person than the Eisenberg potrayal, but that isn't seem to be a problem for me.

Though the story is about Zuckerberg, it's Saverin we come to sympathize with. Zuckerberg is more enigmatic. In the end, he seems to worry if he is an asshole. There are few women in the film with anything more than a cursory personality. One is the lawyer that is shown to be on Zuckerberg's side. She reassures him that he is not an asshole, though he seems to be trying hard to be one.

As Zuckerberg stares as the business card that Parker helped him craft "I'm the CEO, bitch", he realizes that Parker is a bad influence and being the CEO, bitch, means he is ultimately responsible for Facebook's reputation. Saverin may have been right, but Parker was, in his way, also right.

The film focuses on the drama of how one person or a small group of people took ambitious steps to work to the most successful social network, and it's in this human drama that the film works, because it's hard to mine drama out of algorithms and code and to explain why social networking was so compelling to so many people.

No Friends for Old Men

So here's the deal. Most of us work because, well, everything runs on money. You want food? I guess you could grow your own, but that takes a lot of planning. So you spend money and you get food. Need a place to stay because, well, it's hard to just go out in the woods and just live unless you know what you are doing. And the place costs, yes, money.

Then, presuming you live in a society that produces goods and advertises such goods, you begin to covet. I want this, and I want that. And all that costs, yes, money.

For many folks, this money comes in a 9-to-5 job. Of course, there's no such thing as a 9 to 5 job anymore. With jobs occasionally scarce, the idea is work harder for more hours for the same pay. At least you have a job. But the point is, you spend 8 hours a day at work.

How much time does that leave? OK, let's say you have no kids because that's going to take a chunk of time out of your life. Maybe you need to be up by 7:30, wake up, shower, eat, assuming you want breakfast, and then do the dreaded commute. You live in a place that's affordable and work in a place that's not. So you spend an hour getting to work and an hour getting back from work. So maybe 3.5 hours just dealing with the logistics of getting to and fro.

So maybe you're back by 6, and then you have to think about cooking, or perhaps you eat out, or perhaps do a microwave dinner. Maybe you have a significant other. That leaves you 4-5 hours to spend time with them, which isn't insignificant, but is less than the time you were at work.

And perhaps, if you're not a complete recluse, you make friends at work. Humans are a social people, and we are at our most social when we are with other people. The awkwardness of not talking to people when you're around people is so overwhelming that we talk.

But are these really your friends? How much would you talk to these people outside of work? If I were to point out a work colleague, would you say "Yeah, he's a nice guy, friendly". Let's say you say that. Then, I ask, "do you talk to him outside of work". And you say "no". I ask "why not". And you say "I don't know. I guess I'm not that interested. Besides, he's married. Why would he talk to me?".

I was reminded that money makes "friends" of many people. Lately, in my respite between occupations, I've been taking tennis lessons. The guy who runs the company texts me, mostly because I'm worth revenue to his company. He wants to be nice. He wants to be helpful. He's checking up on how I'm doing. Were there not money tied to this situation, he would have no reason to make this effort. Business, you see, makes people friendly.

There's one peculiar exception that plays on the desire to communicate that is separate from work. It's college. If you choose to stay in dormitories, you are now surrounded by many people of a similar socio-economic status. And many dorms encourage roommates. Living with others compels you to talk to them, and usually, people will pick friends or at least make friends with those near them.

How often do people make friends because they just happened to be assigned to the same dormitory? Quite often. That's because it's awkward to go to a random dorm, hang out, just to meet people from that dorm. People want you to be there with a reason. That's why you talk to people at work, and not to people at some other workplace (though, I have seen some people show enough cojones to do just that, mostly because they caught sight of a pretty lass that they wanted to talk up).

As much as people excel in communication when in proximity to dormmates or to co-workers, they fare poorly once distance is added.

Ask yourself who you talk to most? For most folks, it might be a spouse, or a significant other, and then, there's your parents. For as much as you may like or dislike your parents, there's some obligation to talk to them. They have experience in the world. They spent time raising you. You feel bad not talking to them.

Short of folks who hate their parents, this is a pretty normal. No complaints, right?

So now make a list of people you consider to be your friends. Some live near you, and so you could, in principle, go out and do things. Some are just far enough away that getting together is a bit of a hassle. Some are too far away, so the only way to communicate is to use technology.

You would think technology would be wonderful. Phone, texting, IM, email. And yet, there are plenty of people who hate this. And the etiquette works out that you can ignore people using any of those formats. Before answering machines came around, when the phone rang, you picked it up. After the answering machine came around, you'd have phone spammers and then you didn't want to pick up the phone.

Phone spammers ruined the innocence of the phone. But once you had an answering machine, you could let the machine record the message and you could see who it was. And, of course, now that many people have cell phones, you get caller ID and can figure out, for the most part, who is calling you.

So now you see who calls you and you can decide "I don't want to talk to them". Email is pretty much the same. IM likewise. Indeed, the only awkward refusal is face to face. If I come up to you and say "hi", it would be rude of you to ignore me. But every other technological way to communicate and you can feel free to ignore me.

The primary reason this has happened is because face-to-face interaction involves recognizing what the other person is doing. If they're busy, then maybe you don't interact. And there is a limited interaction. You can't have 10 people talk to you at once in person, but on IM, you could. On IM, you can't see what the other person is doing. Maybe they're watching a movie. Maybe they are listening to music. Maybe they are talking to another friend.

So back to your list of friends. How many do you keep in regular contact? How much time do you spend a week? Is the answer zero? Why? Why do you have co-workers you'd never spend time outside of work and spend a non-trivial amount of time with them, but spend zero time with those you consider your friends?

I suppose the answer is partly convenience and partly embarrassment. Some folks don't like to talk. That's it. They'll hang out with you at a movie, or a concert, at some location where there's not much interaction, but to them, that's doing something. But if you have to talk, just talk, well, that doesn't feel right, and so it doesn't happen.

Part of it is embarrassment. What would you talk about? Somehow these questions don't seem to come up when you bump into these folks in real life, and yet, on a phone or on IM, the words become scarce. People treat the phone as a planning device. When do you want to meet? Can I do something for you? And so forth.

So why does this happen? Do you feel bad that the only people you talk to, outside of a handful of people, are your coworkers? We say we value our friends, but do we?

Almost Famous

I'm watching bits and pieces of Almost Famous, the semi auto-biography of direction, Cameron Crowe. Crowe was a teenager who wrote for Rolling Stone. I wonder what he thought when they picked Patrick Fugit to play himself.

One realizes that acting is, well, acting. It's not real. When you act, it's an idealization of real life, the emotions are bigger. Fugit, alas, can't really act. It doesn't kill the film, but you realize he doesn't have the chops to pull it off. I read somewhere that Crowe had to improvise.

Fugit has this wide-eyed look about him, and lacks the emotional maturity and range to pull of someone that is, by all accounts, a prodigy (a writing prodigy, to be sure).

Kate Hudson pretty much acts circles around him, though her role is to be some idealized female, so it's really important that she can act and it's less of a problem that Fugit looks mostly googly-eyed throughout.

That is all.

Telugu Woman

American woman, stay away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
I don’t wanna see your face no more


I've heard the song American Woman for a while but never really paid attention to the lyrics. I guess it's about a stalker woman and a guy who wants this woman out of her life. For some reason, this song came to mind when I wanted to title this blog.

Yesterday, I went to the bank. I have several bank accounts, but this is one of those accounts I rarely use, and yet I have enough money residing there that it's always a bit of a pain that I have to deal with this account. Each year, I forget I have this account and I get locked out. Each year, I make a trek to re-open the account at a local branch near my old workplace.

I decided I wanted to pull most of my money from this account and went down to the bank to close out several other accounts and consolidate this account into one. I had to go down to the branch office to make this happen.

As it turns out, the branch office is aimed at Asians, mostly Chinese folks. I talked to one guy, and he showed me my accounts. He told me to talk to another woman who would take care of the account consolidation and closing down of unwanted accounts. After that was done, I still had one issue. I couldn't log into my account online.

The woman that had helped me said that there was a line (well, one other person) and couldn't help me. I was told to go back to the original guy to help out. But, he was busy too. There was an Indian woman beside him that said she could help me, so I went to her office.

As she was helping me get my online account, I asked her if she knew any Hindi. Hindi is the common language of India, but many don't speak the language. She said she spoke Telugu.

Telugu!

I knew that language. Ravi, who used to work at our company, and Vijay, both spoke Telugu. This is a language spoken in Andhra Pradesh in south India. AP (as it's called in short) is known for its spicy cuisine and its Hyderabadi biryani. Hyderabad is the capital of the state and biryani is a rice dish made with meat, typically, chicken.

Like many states in India, AP has its own film industry. Everyone has heard of Bollywood, but that refers to "Bombay Hollywood". Bombay (also called Mumbai) is in the state of Maharashtra where Hindi is mostly spoken. Although it's the biggest film industry, many other states produce films too, including AP, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

Each state has its own superstar, an actor (sometimes actors) so famous that they are living legends. The US hasn't had stars like this since Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The death of a superstar is cause for national mourning. In Bollywood, that star is Amitabh Bachchan, though he is now something of an elder statesman. In Tamil Nadu, it's Rajnikanth. In Andhra Pradesh, it's Chiranjeevi.

South Indian films are often filled with implausible action scene, such as this short clip from a much longer chase scene:



The star on the horse is Chiranjeevi from AP.

I talked to the woman for 20-30 minutes discussing Indian culture. She seemed unusually happy to talk with me, and it was a nice diverting way to spend the afternoon taking care of errands.

Friends and Coworkers

Wow, I haven't blogged here in quite a while, so for those still following, hi again. I have been spending my time doing tennis blogging and that has taken a bit of my time.

I want you to think about the following. Do you have an SO (significant other)? Do you have family? Do you have friends? Do you have coworkers?

Assuming you are monogamous, you have one SO. Now, pick 3 members of your family. Let's say, your parents, and a sibling. Pick 3 of your closest friends. Pick 3 coworkers.

Ask yourself how often you talk to your SO. Presumably, being your SO, this answer is a lot. You probably see or talk to your SO every day, perhaps for at least an hour.

Now, your coworkers. You might say "I have a job to do, so I have to talk to my coworkers". That might be an hour a day spread over the workday.

Now, your family. If you're reasonably close to your family, you probably talk to them once a week, and if not so close, but not completely alienated, you probably talk once a month. If your family is close to your distant relatives, even those you may not particularly care for, you may be obligated to see them and engage in small talk.

Now, your friends. How you answer depends, I suspect, very much on gender and your personality. In other words, if you are an introverted guy, this introversion, plus a sense of male pride (guys need to be independent) means as close as you may be with your friends, you might not actually keep in close contact at all.

This begs the question. How did you become close friends? One answer, which isn't surprising, is that you went to college with your friends, and you either studied with them, or you lived on campus, and arranged to live with your friends. Your living arrangements forced you to hang out with your friends, which forced your interaction level to be quite high. If your friends are even a few minutes away living in a dorm just over there, your interaction may go way down.

Now, there are those addicted to chat, and such interactions are more than likely, of the girl/guy variety. But I know quite a few people that dislike chat, dislike phone interaction, dislike email. All they like is interpersonal interactions. You can have a long engaging conversation face-to-face that lasts hours, but you'll be hard-pressed to duplicate such interactions in IM. There's just too much typing, thus too much work. And IM always seems like an interruption. You're trying to read a news article, or watch a funny cat video, or heaven forbid, get some work done.

In real life, you know you are talking to a person by themselves. They aren't engaged in something else, or at the very least, they are pausing it for your behalf. When you IM someone, they might be chatting with someone else, or doing any number of other things, and they might be a lot less willing to stop their discussion just to talk to you.

So how does that social dynamic work? You go from hanging out in the dorms where you get to do fun stuff for a period of time every day to ...? Well, once you leave that situation, you might get to everyone doing their own thing. This is one reason many people look to finding a SO to begin with. If your friends, upon going separate ways, won't even bother to talk to you once a week, then how to make up that interaction?

You take a bigger chance and find someone that is committed to being with you that time. Except this kind of relationship is almost always sexual in nature, or has that implication. It seems OK for early teens, bored with life, lacking close relationships to do stuff with their friends: watch movies, eat out, hang out someplace. Some folks are much better at this than others. They value their friendships and invite folks over all the time.

But to invite folks over requires two more skills. First, you should know how to cook. Second, you should be neat. Oh, and third, it helps to like conversation. All of these are skills that a typical geek doesn't have, especially the conversation bit. Even folks that are reasonably neat sometimes place high expectations of neatness on themselves and never feel their place is neat enough, and thus, never have guests over. I know the neatness aspect is a huge problem for me, but I've also hardly been invited to anyone's place.

What about email? I think several things put people off about email. One, the brain seems much more comfortable with the spoken word than the written word. Somehow, there are higher expectations placed on writing than reading. There is also interaction when you speak to someone that makes it feel like a social, human, bonding event.

Although email has become more ubiquitous, and this has lead to people writing short, terse mails akin to text messaging, there's still some pressure by those who fancy themselves writers to write something that is worth reading. Indeed, folks get writer's block and then decide email is a kind of writing and that their lives are a little too boring to read. In the end, no email is sent, and that's kinda sad too.

I've never had a sustained email contact with anyone, well, no more than a few months, which is pretty long in itself. You hear of husbands and wives a hundred years ago who exchanged letters for more than a decade, the experience savored over time. The convenience and speed of email should make that easier than ever, but the convenience and speed of email means there's no need to be that thoughtful. When you had snail mail, and the effort to exchange correspondence was very slow, there was a premium placed on the content put in letters.

I happen to grow up before email and remember sending and receiving the occasional snail mail. There was an expectation for letters to be 2-3 pages long at the very least. I remember my brother sending me many small pages in letters. The thought placed into such letters even over mundane topics was tremendous compared to the lack of thought placed in today's rapid emails.

Recently, a friend began using Google's video chat service. This has the convenience of not having to be installed. True, he has to be motivated to make the "call", but he has done so a few times. The advantage? You can talk! It brings back some of the immediacy of face to face conversation. When you do video chat, you find typing to be a nuisance. Things that you might not have typed, you can quickly ask. I find my brain engaged more in the act of conversation. Things I say, I wouldn't have typed. Why does the brain engage itself in such ways?

Ah, but what about real interaction? I've known some folks that seem to have pretty active social lives. Some of that comes from having roommates. While the notion of roommates is pretty uncommon in the US--everyone wants their own place, it is quite common in India where the inclination of the educated middle class just out of college is to save money. If you ask the recent graduate why they don't live by themselves, they scoff at the idea, exclaiming how expensive it is.

I'd love to see how their salary breaks down and to see whether living by oneself is truly expensive or whether Americans have left themselves to take huge chunks of their salary to living on their own. Perhaps the typical Indian graduate thinks their rent should be no more than 10% of their take-home pay, while Americans plunk down 30% to give themselves independence. I tend to believe it's the second. As an American, we spend too much money on our own housing to give ourselves independence.

I do know some folks that have roommates. Saving money, of course, is one big concern. The second is to have people around, to create a social environment that they may not have had since they were in college. Of course, for every good roommate, there is the potential for bad ones. This is why some folks have multiple roommates, to spread the potential for bad interaction out, and to have allies in case one person is a bad apple.

But such situations seems rare. Extroverts are rare almost by definition. Well, they're rare. They find more solace with doing activities with friends. They look for things to do, get together with friends, and head out. And, given the sexual innuendo that seems to seep in a typical American's life, many of these social occasions are a mix, with guys and girls, but sometimes not. The thing is, only fairly social extroverts seem to have the incentive to go out and do stuff and they seem to mostly hang out with other extroverts.

If I'm making a point, it's that although we are social creatures, there are impasses that prevent people from being social. Conservative cultures like India are culturally more social. There is a premium placed on meeting with people, and even the frowned-upon male-female interaction usually leads to guys doing stuff with guys and girls doing stuff with girls to make up for the lack of dating interaction. The pressure to save money causes guys and girls to live together and add social interaction to their lives. And of course, arranged marriages create that ultimate of connections.

On the other hand, in the US, there is some degree of shame calling people that are merely friends to do things. Many prefer skipping the uncertainty of friendship to the certainty of a relationship. They want several hours of committed time each week, as opposed to and uncertain number of hours with friends. So once that commitment occurs, that reduces the time to meet other people, and they too want to have a commitment. Pretty soon, you have many people in relationships that don't have time to hang out with one another.

Ironically, conservative societies tend to interact better. Why is that? To point to India again, although some couples are more enlightened and look to spend time with each other together sharing common activities, hundreds of years of men and women being segregated with guys doing guy stuff and women doing women stuff have lead to marriages where guys still want to do stuff with other guys and women want to do stuff with other women.

You would think a marriage would mean the guys really don't have time to spend with you, but the commitment deal has already been sealed. I play tennis with some fifty-something guys who seem eager to play tennis every day, meaning they want to spend time away from their wives to hang out with their male friends doing "male" activities. Although it's possible these wives could participate, they seem to avoid these male activities.

On the other hand, those who haven't committed to marriage, i.e., in a dating phase, even in a long-term relationship, feel the commitment of time is there, and spare time should not be willing given up to hang out with friends.

The point is, there's isn't exactly a platonic equivalent of a commitment between friends, which is too bad because I think many people would benefit from regular social interaction outside the workplace.