postaday

I, Toward a Metrics of Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the interest of full self-disclosure, what follows will disclose nothing about me.

I am a Twitterer. I Tweet. Once a year or so, I will participate in the nightly cocktail party, the veritable Algonquin Round Table, of online wordplay and games that can be found on that social media outlet. Perhaps you’ve seen these games, in which people follow the instruction given in a catchy hashtag, like hashtag (which is this symbol: #) “Add A Word Ruin A Movie.” As in: #AddAWordRuinAMovie. And then a participant, me let us say, will snarkily add a word to a famous movie title to ironically change the entire complexion of the movie. “Midnight in the Olive Garden of Good and Evil” is one that I love but can not claim credit for.

One day last year, the wit-fest of hashtag joking, the hive mind of Twitter intellect, had come up with #DrabFilms, and this was my contribution, and it was met with universal silence:

Not one single re-Tweet on there. Not one “favorite.” Bupkiss.

There is little in the world sadder or lonelier than a one-liner delivered to no one in a crowded room crammed with people ignoring the joke-maker’s contributions. “If a Tweet falls in a forest,” someone philosophically minded might ask, “with no one to re-Tweet it, did it make a sound? Nay, did it even exist?” (There are a handful of congressmen who might have their own answers to this question.)

“I Tweet, therefore I know that I am doing what I told you I am doing once I tell you what I am doing because others tell me that they say that they approve.”

Do I know what I am doing, where I have been, where I am going, who I am with—who I am, even?—without social verification, approval, disapproval, a certain number of thumbs-ups or stars or re-Tweets?

The American corporate world introduced the idea of measuring everything many decades ago but in the late 1990s employees discovered that their continued employment was dependent on finding new ways to measure everything. I remember my revulsion upon hearing the word “metrics” used in a sentence the first time. (For months, I heard the ghost-word “system” every time I heard “metric.”) The precise sentence was, “We are using all available metrics,” and I quickly noticed that no one else at the meeting table was laughing and they were still scribbling notes more furiously than students in a freshman philosophy seminar. For a while, the number of documents I was actively working on was my key metric, I was told by my employer. Then it was the total number of pages. It changed, often, but the accumulated number of metrics used to measure my metrics was never itself added up and counted. For a year or two I was publishing the average number of pages per document completed. Then it was pages per document per day.

Some time after that one, I was let go. A bad attitude has no metrics.

The social media revolution was long in coming and I enjoy it very much, but metrics have infiltrated our lives, even our fun-filled social lives. “How many ‘likes’ did that get?” Does my employment hinge on it? No? Why does it feel like it does?

When a celebrity or otherwise important person finds him or herself in an online controversy, the number of re-Tweets of the news-worthy posting is supplied in news accounts about the contretemps. The fact that a number is available and can be reported does not make it a statistic, much less a statistic worth reporting.

Sadly, I find myself watching the likes and numbers of visits to this web site right here, the one in your hands, every night. “The Gad About Town” is not my employment, it is something I want to do and share. But the fine people at WordPress make the information so easy to find and digest. It is information after all and it looks like an impressive collection of live statistics and it makes me want to have a boss to report it to every night. (So I Tweet it out sometimes, to attract more readers.) “This number of visitors read my work last night, but it is a smaller number tonight. Whycome is that, world?” Sad face.

(Sigh.) Metrics.

Never before in my life have I known how many friends I have, but if I wanted to, I could look and see every morning if the number of my online friends is larger or smaller than yesterday’s. Metrics.

Am I my numbers? Am I my metrics of me? Everything in the world can be counted, and that number can be known and disclosed, but more often than not this one fact does not make it information.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 1 asks, “To be, to have, to think, to move—which of these verbs is the one you feel most connected to? Or is there another verb that characterizes you better?” I Tweet.

Deus Ex

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In classical drama, the term deus ex machina refers to a plot device wherein a plot problem is suddenly solved by the arrival of a previously unannounced character who supplies the answer or solution. “But don’t you know? That’s your brother!” would be a typical line delivered by a deus ex machina character, thus helping our heroes avert a troublesome situation.

When a playwright or novelist needs to fix an intractable plot puzzle, he or she might resort to the tool, which is Latin for “god from the machine,” or “you couldn’t figure it out for yourself with the characters you’d created, so you punted,” but audiences since ancient times have tended to see through the fix. “Where did HE come from?” More often than not nowadays, it is used ironically, but when you find yourself reading a book and seeing lines delivered by a character that you do not remember being introduced to, your inattentive reading is not to blame. That character really was not there 20 pages earlier.

A more restrained writer might use a deus ex machina-type character to do something simpler than solve everything; the character might supply background information. Or another character might do something like get a character who knows a secret drunk to spill the story, turning that character into the god-machine. In vino veritas, the Latin expression declares, and I do not think anyone needs it translated here.

Any deus ex machina fixes that you might encounter in real life are more rightly known as surprises. Anyone who reveals something that they claim to have known about all along is either a busybody or a breaker of confidences, and you ought to do everything in your imagination to make sure they get stuck with the bill for every lunch for a year.

But what if you could learn something secret from one of your friends by administering some sort of truth serum? (I would hope, for all of our sakes, that if we could learn what our friends truly think of us that we would learn they hold us in higher esteem than we think they do. Nothing worse. One hopes one’s friendships are that open-faced and honest.)

There in fact is a drug that some consider a truth serum. It is sodium thiopental, better known by its Abbott Laboratories brand name of Sodium Pentothal, and it is a barbiturate that is used as a general anesthetic. Because it is such a strong anesthetic, it is more frequently administered to induce a coma than it is to knock someone out for a tooth extraction; further, it is usually the first drug injected into the arm of a prisoner as he or she is being put to death.

On and off for many decades, police in certain countries (including this one) have administered the drug to get prisoners to talk, to spill the beans, to yack away the location of whatever it is the police are looking for but can not find. Nothing would help in crime solving or crime prevention more than a real-life deus ex machina, and in sodium thiopental veritas goes the thinking. More often than not, the beans that were spilled under the effects of the drug were hallucinations and dreams and probably more revealing of a psyche under duress and being put to sleep than the location of an un-apprehended bad guy’s house.

But police forces keep searching: for bad guys and evildoers as well as for the perfect drug that would get the apprehended bad guys to talk and thus create a real life deus ex machina. For some, Steven Spielberg’s film of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” depicts one man’s unnecessary interference with a fine legal system rather than the hopeful end of dystopian nightmare.

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“What’s that, sweetness? Oh, we’re going to dinner? Now? Okay. I’ll finish typing this right about n- -”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 30 asks, “You’ve come into possession of one vial of truth serum. Who would you give it to (with the person’s consent, of course)—and what questions would you ask?”

Fact or Not-Fact

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the 1990s, one of my co-workers at a bookshop used to relocate the paperback sci-fi books inspired by “The X-Files” television series from the Fiction/Sci-Fi section to the Nonfiction/Science section. This was not something she did to be ironic or otherwise witty; she did not know that the books were “made-up” and thought the TV series was a documentary.

She told me one day in a flurry of words that people needed to know the truth about how the world is. I agreed, but I did not tell her what truth I thought “people” should “know”: What was true was I considered her nuts. When I pointed out that the publisher itself labeled the books as fiction, she replied that this was a sure sign of the cover-up, that the publishing house was doing its part to stay safe.

One day, I left the books in the non-fiction section and watched as a customer moved them back to Fiction/Sci-Fi. Another day, I watched as my genre-confused co-worker became an ex-employee of the bookstore.

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Alf Evers was the historian of the Catskills region in upstate New York. His long (so long it is almost cube-shaped) history, “The Catskills,” was the first definitive text about the area when it was published in 1972. The book is definitive but it is not the resource to turn to if one is searching for dollar figures or numbers of acres. Oh, those appear here and there, when needed, but they are not often needed. Instead, he is a grand storyteller. Here is his epic opening for the chapter entitled, “Made of Wood”:

When permanent settlers arrived in the Catskills, the mountains’ trees began to move out. Before human beings became part of the society of living things which surrounds and covers the Catskills, trees rarely left the mountains. Each tree struggled to live and reproduce on its birthplace and, if it escaped fire, wind, competition from its fellows, and insect and fungus attack, it lived out its destined span of life and died. Then its body would be taken apart by bacteria, fungi, and flying and wriggling things, and it would returned to the earth to become the building material of new bodies. Indians had carried away parts of trees: the gum of the balsam fir for medicine or to calk canoes, maple syrup to sweeten their diet; or bits of wood well adapted to one purpose or another. But this had caused no visible change in the Catskills’ forests. Nor had John Bartram‘s gathering of seeds and seedlings for his British landscape-gardening customers. But when the first settlers and their sawmills appeared, things began to change.

Scene: set. A history of Catskills lumbering follows, but as we read on we carry with us the reminder that each individual tree, cut down or left alone, had and has its own life story. Human beings, Native Americans and European settlers alike, are given much the same respect by Evers, and he reminds us often that there are many individual stories that make the numbers, the quotidian facts, the real part of “real life.”

(I had the honor of interviewing Mr. Evers once. He was in his 90s and hard of hearing and sight but lived on his own in a book-lined and -furnished cabin in Shady, New York. [Yes, that is a real place name.] He passed away in 2004, a few weeks shy of his 100th birthday. The magazine for which I was interviewing Mr. Evers folded before the interview was published and I wrote it many computers ago, so it is long lost.)

The facts, the numbers of life, the details that fill the ledgers in which we count our ups and downs, those can trap some historians. There are some who can make a reader feel like they are doing no better than reading someone’s checkbook for themselves, with no context supplied. Raw facts are not Evers’ concern; he had obviously studied the various deeds and checkbooks and then digested the information and knew a good story when he had one to tell.

A good story. That is the concern of any writer, whether he or she is engaged in fiction or non-fiction. James Joyce by Richard Ellmann is one of the great biographies. It is so detailed and crammed full with letters written by and to Joyce that one sometimes thinks that it might take one as long as Joyce’s 58 years alive to read it. It is often a fun and funny book, and Ellmann certainly knew he had a good life story to tell. (I do not know why there has not yet been a film biography of Joyce’s life; perhaps because it did not end with a sweet redemptive moment, Joyce winning an award, for instance.) Joyce’s novels (his fiction) are enhanced by the experience of reading the biography. And reading Ellmann’s biography is enhanced by reading and loving Joyce’s novels.

Some of the best non-fiction reads like fiction and some of the best fiction reads like non-fiction. That does not mean “The X-Files” books can go in the Science section.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 29 asks, “When reading for fun, do you usually choose fiction or non-fiction? Do you have an idea why you prefer one over the other?”