Cultural milestones

Borders' Books flagship store in downtown Ann Arbor

In ways big and small, the odometer of life rolls along.

-- Seemingly half a lifetime ago, I arrived in Ann Arbor in the late summer of 1983 to begin a yearlong fellowship at the University of Michigan. In the days before the fall semester began, I had ample time to explore the city and made the most excellent discovery: Borders bookstore.

With its sidewalk tables of heavily discounted books and wealth of other merchandise inside, it became a place I visited regularly. From that flagship location, Borders expanded into a national behemoth, with nearly 400 stores, including 10 in Oregon. So I was saddened by this week's news that Borders Group is going out of business.

I'm not in a position to second-guess the company's business decisions about expansion and debt. But I can react viscerally to the loss of a chain of bookstores that, to me, signals another troubling step away from reading. Yes, consumer tastes are changing, helped along by the advent of e-readers, but my gut tells me that Borders' closing represents more than just a shift to Kindles and Nooks and iPads.

-- On Wednesday, I sent out my 200th tweet. It was an innocuous reply to a fellow staffer at The Oregonian, publicly thanking her for tweeting about me and two co-workers who manage the hyperlocal public blogs on OregonLive.com. If you don't understand that sentence, I'm not surprised. Twitter is a whole new world, where communication occurs in bursts of 140 characters or less, helped along by URL-shorteners like bitly.com and tinyurl.com.

In the transformation from print to online journalism, I've had to acquire a new vocabulary and new skills in order to navigate intelligently in cyberspace -- or in what my colleague, Cornelius Swart, calls the changing and ever-evolving "news ecosystem." Getting out there on Twitter is just one of the ways of engaging in new ways with readers, writers and friends. At this point, @georgerede has 287 followers. I'm following 214 people and organizations and I've sent 202 tweets.

Here's No. 201: Never too late to tweet this: Cornelia Welch persevered when facing words that stung, eyes that failed | OregonLive.com. http://bit.ly/nCrYVe

Photograph: wikipedia.org

Brain fart

Brain fart: A gap, interruption, or uncontrolled shift in a chain of thought resulting in a lull, pause, and/or blank stare during oral communication and sometimes involving the loss of short term memory.
-- Urban Dictionary

Late yesterday afternoon, when I headed down the street to catch my ride home, I reached into my shoulder bag and grabbed for my wallet so I could flash my bus pass to the driver. To my shock and the driver's amusement, I realized I was showing him my ID badge from work. D'oh!

A sign of senility? Or just a brain fart? Call it what you like. I chalk it up to inattentiveness caused by ... texting! Yes, I plead guilty. I was typing a message to Lori as I was walking toward the bus and instead got caught with a momentary lack of focus.

But, hey, I can laugh it off. Even before I had a smartphone to distract me, I had more than my share of mental lapses. .

-- Such as the time when I rode the bus home from work and only then remembered I'd driven that day and left my car downtown. 
-- Or the time I fell asleep and woke up near a cemetery, more than a mile from where we lived.
-- Or the time I parked the car in front of what I thought was our house, only to realize I was on the wrong block.

-- Or, worst of all, the time I rode the bus to where I'd left my car parked for the day, only to realize I'd left my keys at work.

No big insight here. Just a good reminder to not take myself seriously -- and to realize yet again how attempts at multitasking, no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned, can easily go awry.

Image by www.giggleon.com

Is it fashionable to be rude?

The last couple of posts have dealt with mobile technology and manners. We've become so accustomed to our smartphones that we take for granted the ability to be connected nearly 24/7 to family, friends and even work. We can check email, send a tweet, watch a video, upload a photo or troll the internet virtually any time, any place.

But do we know when to power it down?

Thanks to David Carr's timely feature story in Sunday's New York Times, "Keep Your Thumbs Still When I'm Talking To You," I've got even more reason to keep myself in check.

Carr considers the digital revolution and what it has wrought, prompted by his recent attendance at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, where he moderated a panel called "I'm So Productive, I Never Get Anything Done."

Featured speakers competed with a screen in almost every seat, he noted. Laptops were everywhere. Tablets even more so. People traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to the conference in Austin, Texas, only to become part of a multitasking mass of thumbing-and-texting zombies. Remarkably, Carr writes:

...once the badge-decorated horde spilled into the halls or went to the hundreds of parties that mark the ritual, almost everyone walked or talked with one eye, or both, on a little screen. We were adjacent but essentially alone, texting and talking our way through what should have been a great chance to engage flesh-and-blood human beings. The wait in line for panels, badges or food became one more chance to check in digitally instead of an opportunity to meet someone you didn’t know.

During Carr's panel, the biggest reaction in the session came, he said, when Anthony De Rosa, a product manager and programmer at Reuters and a big presence on Twitter and Tumblr, said that mobile connectedness has eroded fundamental human courtesies.

“When people are out and they’re among other people they need to just put everything down,” he said. “It’s fine when you’re at home or at work when you’re distracted by things, but we need to give that respect to each other back.” 

His words brought sudden and tumultuous applause. It was sort of a moment, given that we were sitting amid some of the most digitally devoted people in the hemisphere. Perhaps somewhere on the way to the merger of the online and offline world, we had all stepped across a line without knowing it.

Amen.

Ever had someone whip out their phone in the middle of a conversation with you?
Ever had someone check their email during a meal or a meeting?
Or make a phone call from, ahem, a questionable location? (I'm thinking of the time I heard one side of a conversation coming from a stall in the men's restroom at a local theater. Seriously.)


I'd like to think I'm already on the right side of smartphone etiquette, though not perfect, by any means. Thanks to Carr's piece I'll be a little more vigilant -- both about my own behavior and someone else's bad manners.

Photo illustration: Tony Cenicola, The New York Times

Sunday sunshine

I think all of Portland is celebrating today. A special occasion? Yep, the return of the sun.

In recent days, I think even native Oregonians were getting tired of what seemed to be constant rain. Last Thursday and Friday seemed especially dreary.  Saturday was dry but overcast. So when the warm sunshine finally broke through, it lifted spirits, sent people outdoors and restored a little order to the universe.

Lori and I went up to the roof of our condo and had lunch there while Otto laid down on his side and soaked up the rays. Nice.

It may seem counterintuitive to write about such a pleasant day while I'm here inside at the computer. But it's only for a few minutes. Just long enough to say that...

pozole

-- I'm looking forward to cooking dinner tonight. I'm making pozole -- a Mexican soup made with hominy and chicken (or pork) that goes really well with corn tortillas and beer. I'm using a recipe I found in Esquire offered up by the owner of a cafe in Mount Vernon, Iowa, of all places. (For some reason, neither the article nor the recipe is online.) Anyway, the ingredients include onion, garlic, kale, poblano, jalapeno and chipotle chiles, chicken stock, tomatoes, cremini mushrooms and, on top, chopped cilantro, sliced avacados and crumbled goat cheese.

-- I returned to the scene of the crime of my multitasking faux pas on Saturday. (See my previous post: "Multitasking to a fault") As I walked into the grocery store, my iPhone was already put away and so I shut off my iPod, removed my earbuds and went about my business. Went through the checkout line as if it were pre-1977, the year cell phones* went public.

* According to cellphone.org, cell phones were still a rarity 15 years ago, but now most of the world now communicates by cell phone. "The cellular business was a $3 million market 25 years ago and has grown increasingly to close to a $30 billion per year industry," the website says. (Emphasis added.)

Photograph of sunshine by shaheen
Photograph of pozole by Meutia Chaerani / Indradi Soemardjan http://www.indrani.net

Multitasking to a fault

I was going through the checkout line at our neighborhood Safeway the other day when it happened. I was listening to my iPod with my wrap-around earbuds and typing the last few characters of a text message when the cashier rang up my purchase and turned to me for payment.

Caught off guard, I quickly turned off the music and finished the text, then reached for my wallet.

What was I thinking? Was I really trying to do two or three things at once? Why? What was so important that I had to send a text while my groceries were being bagged?

The cashier gave me a half-smile and waited patiently. He should have given me a scowl. I felt profoundly embarrassed and, suddenly, self-indulgent. Right then and there, I vowed never to do that again.

Coincidentally, that same night, as I was looking for a photo to illustrate a recent post, I stumbled upon a blog by Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, and a post she' d written just a few days earlier wrote about cell phones and civility.

According to a recent "mobile etiquette" survey commissioned by Intel, she noted:

U.S. adults see an average of five mobile “offenses,” including the use of mobile devices while driving or talking loudly on a mobile phone in public every day.

Among the respondents who reported seeing offenses, 56% saw car drivers using mobile devices, 48% saw people using one in a restroom and 32% saw them used in movie theaters 

Top pet peeves include talking while driving and talking in a loud voice in public places

74% of survey participants believe that poor mobile manners have created a new type of rage (like road rage but directed at technology users)

65% say they become angry or outraged when they see these offenses . . . YET

20% say they continue to misuse technology because "everyone else is doing it."

I'll admit I can become easily aggravated when I'm stuck behind someone who's driving too slow or talking on a cell phone in an inappropriate place. But until the Safeway  episode, I hadn't seen myself as part of the problem (even if I was texting, not talking).

Brené Brown

"But here's the thing," Brown writes. "Our behaviors are choices and they are completely within our control. Unlike some of the other stressors that we have to navigate on a daily basis, we can ease some of the pressure that we all feel by treating each other with more respect."

I didn't consciously mean to disrespect the cashier but that's certainly how it must have come across to him and other shoppers.

Brené Brown ended her post with a challenge to her readers, one that attracted 73 responses, and I repeat it here.

"Here's what I propose we do to affect (sic) a small dose of change: Leave a comment telling us one  thing that you are currently doing that you'd be willing to change for one week. For example, talking while you're walking down the street or ordering fast food, or answering the phone when you're at a restaurant. 

"Also tell us one thing that really, really bugs you. My one thing is here. I'm going to give up talking while I'm grocery shopping."

What do you say, folks? Is there something you're willing to change?

Image and photo: www.brenebrown.com

Tools of the trade

Talk about a technology whiplash...

I was walking past a copy editor yesterday when I looked down at her desk and spotted this artifact of a bygone era.

"Laurie, is this yours?" I asked. "I haven't seen one of these in years -- no, decades. Wow!"

She said no, she'd found it in a drawer when she changed desks last year and had just hung onto it.

I immediately proposed a "test" and walked over to where our twenty-something social media coordinator was sitting at her computer, looking at multiple columns of the latest tweets from Twitter.

"Ali, do you know what this is?"

She looked at it, puzzled. "An eraser? With a tail?"

Sue, a veteran editor sitting nearby, smiled in recognition. "A typewriter eraser!" She said her mom was a school teacher and used them all the time.

Any journalist or secretary who used a manual typewriter back in the day would have used one, in combination with erasable bond paper, to correct errors and whisk away the eraser crumbs and paper dust. Wikipedia actually has a paragraph on "correction methods" in its entry on the typewriter:

"The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special typewriter eraser made of hard rubber that contained an abrasive material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2 in (50 mm) in diameter by 1/8 in (3 mm) thick, with a brush attached from the center, while others looked like pink pencils, with a sharpenable eraser at the "lead" end and a stiff nylon brush at the other end. Either way, these tools made possible erasure of individual typed letters. Business letters were typed on heavyweight, high-rag-content bond paper, not merely to provide a luxurious appearance, but also to stand up to erasure. Typewriter eraser brushes were necessary for clearing eraser crumbs and paper dust, and using the brush properly was an important element of typewriting skill; if erasure detritus fell into the typewriter, a small buildup could cause the typebars to jam in their narrow supporting grooves."

Why bring this up?

Because two hours later, I was packing up my bag with a video camera, tripod and wireless microphone for an interview with the head of a Portland nonprofit that specializes in programs to help runaway and homeless youth. If all goes as planned, you'll see that video later this month on OregonLive.com.

I started in journalism as a high school junior, using a pen and notebook and typing my stories onto plain office paper using a manual typewriter, then an electric one, where moving paragraphs literally meant cutting and pasting. I still use a pen and notebook; but these days, more often than not I'm wearing a headset and typing my notes onto a computer screen while doing a phone interview. Stories now are composed on laptops as easily as desktop monitors and even smart phones. We upload photos, videos and PDFs from any remote location that connects with our servers, and moving small or huge blocks of copy is as simple as copy-and-paste.

So, yeah, it was a kick to see that typewriter eraser -- a newsroom museum piece. And, yes, it's trite to say but, damn, we've come a long, long, long way with the technology, haven't we?