Ken's Blog

When a disruptive new communication technology comes along, different subpopulations are affected differently. For example, the Web and the SmartPhone had very different impacts on people aged 18-25 than they had on people 65 and older.

These technologies did not necessarily have a greater impact on one of these age groups or the other, all things considered. But they certainly had a different impact.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of ubiquitous wearables, which will be forthcoming sometime in the next few years. Let’s fast forward a bit and consider the imminent technical landscape.

With the wearables that will become widely available in the next four years or so, you will be able to see a high quality wide angle digital image overlaid upon your visual field, properly registered to the world around you. Furthermore, this overlay will be modulated by software that will make powerful inferences about the people and objects you can see.

If you are a young person, you might find the greatest utility in the improved opportunities this will afford for social networking. Conversations can be augmented by shared games and other entertainment, and you will be able to maintain multiple simultaneous channels of private discussion, even during face to face conversations within a group. The awkward “social signaling” required to send or receive a private text within a social situation will go away. And the boundary between local and remote social interactions will become even more blurred than it is now.

If you are a senior citizen, a lot of the things that you may now find troublesome will become easier and less stressful. You will receive unobtrusive help in finding your way through difficult to navigate places and in recalling the names and identities of people you haven’t seen in a while, as well as private reminders of when to take a pill or what items to pick up at the grocery store. Your astigmatism or myopia will be automatically corrected by a single pair of glasses, even as your prescription changes over time. Small or dimly lit text will automatically enlarge and become easier to read.

Of course some benefits will accrue equally to everyone. For example, signs in foreign languages will be automatically translated and rendered readable to all. Train and bus schedules, preferred travel routes, listings of movie and theater times, restaurant seatings, warnings about food allergies, these will become instantly available just by looking. People of all ages will wonder how folks in earlier eras, deprived of such conveniences, had ever managed to get through the day.

As with all previous disruptive media technologies, wearables will have a profound effect on our everyday reality. But also as with all previous such disruptions, the particular effect on you may vary, depending on your needs.

I freely admit that I am feeling a deep sense of schadenfreude, in response to our president’s astonishing moment of shooting himself in the foot today. The advisors of this one-time show host can no longer hide the fact that their boss is a complete idiot.

Today the poor slob actually said (you can’t make this stuff up) that violence in defense of marching with semi-automatic weapons while carrying Nazi flags and shouting anti-Jewish and anti-black slogans is equivalent to violence in opposition to such an ideology. He actually went there. He went to the dark crazy place.

I don’t actually think that this guy is in favor of racist anti-semitic hate mongering. I think it’s more that he literally has no idea that there is an important moral issue at the core of this conversation. He is just that completely out of his depth.

I have recently been watching Bates Motel on Netflix, and I am struck by how it functions on two very different yet parallel levels. This is true of all fictional tales, but is particularly evident in melodrama.

The melodramatic nature of Bates Motel simply helps to highlight an intrinsic duality within all narrative storytelling: Writers and their characters exist in very different yet intertwined realities. When a writer takes us on a journey into the reality of her characters, she inevitably provides a glimpse into her own backstage process.

To the reader or audience, characters seem to exist mainly so that they can evolve emotionally, in reaction to the challenges of an ever changing reality. The audience derives pleasure from identifying with fictional people who seem to respond to challenging situations by undergoing interesting psychological growth and change.

But the writer knows that all encounters between characters and fate must be explicitly engineered. In a fictional narrative, every turn of events needs to be deliberately constructed by its author.

Sometimes, as in a heightened melodrama such as Bates Motel, this duality can become very obvious. Much of the fun of a melodrama is due to the extreme nature of its constructed “reality”. As we watch empathetic characters react to extraordinary events, we find ourselves wondering what they will do in the face of such outrageous and unexpected turns of fortune.

Therefore when the writers introduce new characters, or get rid of old ones, or simply add an unexpected twist to the plot, the audience is essentially being invited to inhabit two simultaneous realities. One is the reality that the characters experience, in which everything they encounter is real. The other is the reality of the author, who is very clearly creating a kind of game for the viewer by throwing all sorts of unexpected events in the paths of our favorite characters.

This duality is present in all fictional narratives. But in a melodrama it becomes so obvious that it can become a dominant aspect of the audience experience.

At dinner tonight
We all tuned our wine glasses
And we made music

This evening I attened a dinner with five colleagues at which we started to go through the 36 questions that lead to love. We did it pretty much just for fun.

After all, it’s not as though the six of us want to end up in a relationship together. That would be way too Sense8. But as it turns out, it’s an amazingly good way to break the ice with a group of people.

I highly recommend it at your next professional meeting. But only if you are meeting with people you like.

Some years ago I posted a recollection of scuba diving in the company of deaf people, and how they were able to seamlessly continue their conversation under water. It was a wonderful example of a characteristic that is generally thought of as a disability becoming flipped, situationally, into a kind of superpower.

I was reminded of this just recently when an old friend told me that he was starting to lose his hearing, and so he had had an in-ear hearing aid installed. The tech is pretty cool. For example, the battery is integrated into the unit, and charges via induction. He keeps the charger under his pillow and it recharges every night while he sleeps.

But the coolest part is that he has it set up to integrate with his SmartPhone. When he gets alerts or messages, he can privately hear them, without needing to look at his phone. To me this feels like an early prototype of some future, less obtrusive, form of augmented reality.

It’s fascinating to witness two such clear examples of a disability flipped into a superpower — one in an encounter with our natural heritage, and the other in an encounter with our cyber future. Perhaps, with some creative thinking, we will eventually discover other sensory superpowers can be at our fingertips (maybe literally).

Tonight, at Sea Island,
I swam in the ocean
Under the stars,
With the moon on one side
And Cassiopeia
On the other.
The sea was warm, inviting.
Waves crashed carelessly
Against my naked body,
While time itself
Seemed to stand
Perfectly still.

There is a beautiful moment in Act I of Romeo and Juliet, when the two teenagers meet for the first time at a masked ball, and immediately start flirting. They really are just two young kids (Juliet is only thirteen) but in Shakespeare’s heightened reality, transcendent emotion calls for transcendent language.

So without either character realizing it, their words of flirtation (leading to their first kiss) blend together perfectly to form one of Shakespeare’s greatest sonnets. I repeat this magical bit of dialog below, so you can see for yourself.

It’s one of the things I love about Shakespeare: The characters on stage generally have no idea that the words they speak just happen to form some of the greatest poetry in the history of the English language. But we in the audience do, and the effect is purest heaven.

ROMEO	If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET	Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO	Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET	Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO	O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET	Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO	Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

Today in the New York Times I saw an article that caught my eye, because of the accompanying photos. The two images were of top mathematicians, both recently deceased. One was Marina Ratner, the other Maryam Mirzakhan.

For one wild crazy moment I fantasized that the article was just going to talk about their ideas, honoring them as mathematicians, and outlining their intellectual accomplishments. But we do not live in that world.

The article did discuss their ideas, translated very well into lay terminology. But the major point of the article — written by Amie Wilkinson, herself a mathematician — was the dearth of women among the ranks of mathematicians, and the consequent lack of successful female role models for young women contemplating a career in mathematics.

Of course this is a real issue, and the passing of two top mathematicians is a good occasion to raise it. There is woeful gender disparity in this field.

But in that crazy moment, I imagined that I had glimpsed an alternate saner world. In that saner world I was simply reading an article in the New York times about the brilliant work of two top minds.

Sure, they happened to be female, but in my imagined alternate world we would have long ago realized that mathematics is gender neutral. That alternate version of the article would be about the fascinating and intellectually elegant work of these two mathematicians, and what we might all learn from it.

I am currently working with a diverse group of people at NYU to create live theater in shared VR. Generally speaking, our project is inspired by Janet Murray’s seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, although I am starting to suspect that there may be a contradiction in that title.

Specifically, it may be that Shakespeare’s emphasis on using words to carry the dramatic action stands in direct contrast to the need in VR to carry dramatic action through spatial awareness. It is possible that these two divergent sets of priorities can be reconciled, but I do not yet see a way to do that.

One thing we have discovered, not surprisingly, is that there is no way to reason your way into knowing what works and what doesn’t work in VR theater. You need everyone to get into the space, put on their VR headsets, and try things out. Ideas that seemed perfectly plausible on paper tend to fall apart when you actually try them, and vice versa.

In a sense, we are looking for what might be called the Lego bricks of VR theater. What are the equivalents to elements of film vocabulary as establishing shots and cut on action? Or of elements in traditional theater such as blocking and sight lines?

We are starting to figure these things out, through the slow and highly iterative process of workshopping. But it’s worth it. After we have all our Lego bricks together, we will be able to use them to build a Lego castle.

But maybe not in Elsinore.