Ken’s Blog

My friend Davi and I were discussing the power of branding. Davi pointed out that the real genius of Starbucks is that they burn their coffee. If you do that, then it doesn’t matter exactly what coffee beans you use – it all pretty much tastes the same. In this way, Starbucks is able to achieve quality control at affordable prices. Customers expect the coffee to be burnt. In fact, thanks to the power of advertising, they actually come to believe that this is how coffee is supposed to taste. Meanwhile, Starbucks can use relatively inexpensive beans, and still produce a reliably reproducible taste.

Imagine the plight of a coffee shop that tried to compete with this formula through proper brewing of very high quality coffee beans. Not only would their raw material costs be higher, but their customers would actually be able to taste any deviations from quality – whether due to beans that were a little off, or due to some misstep in the brewing process. Starbucks doesn’t have this problem. Not only do their beans cost less, but as long as their beans are adequate, and the result has that burnt taste, customers will be satisfied – getting exactly the taste they’ve been conditioned to accept.

I pointed out that something similar is going on with the Apple iPhone. As an input device, its capacitive touch screen is really inaccurate. Because of the inherent noisiness of the signal, Apple “blurs” the data to smooth it out, which results in a mushy and inexact quality of touch.

Ingeniously, Apple has designed their entire interface around the limited capabilities of their touch screen. Objects that you touch on your screen glide and float and do cute little animations. All of this hides the fact that the computer isn’t really registering exactly where and when you touched. But Apple has trained its customers to expect this fuzzy kind of input, and so the users are happy, remaining blissfully unaware of the greater power they would have if only they had access to a truly responsive input device.

I guess this kind of thing goes on all the time. Some new player in a field, by virtue of excellent marketing skills, retrains an audience to crave mediocrity rather than excellence. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is the way many people actually now prefer the boring metronomic sound of a drum machine, rather than the far more organic and expressive quality of a live drummer.

I have no idea whether this is a permanent trend – an inevitable consequence of the power of branding in our modern age. Maybe we are seeing a glimpse into a world ruled by a brand-friendly mediocracy. Or maybe it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

The day before a prolonged trip to another country is always filled with lists. The bills I haven’t gotten around to paying, phone calls I have not yet returned, all the little things that I’ve put off because I could, after all, do them tomorrow.

But when I’m about to get on a plane to another continent, I realize that “tomorrow” is going to take awhile, and that I’d better get some of those things done now, today, before leaving. I think that on some level I use these trips as a way to organize my life – to do the things that I’d never quite get around to, if time were simply measured from one day to the next.

In a sense, a long trip is like a punctuation mark in one’s perception of time, a set of tall markers that stand out in one’s personal history like a row of ragged fence posts. They come between the long interludes back on the home front when one day blends seamlessly into the next, these trips to distance places – these disruptive and eventful markers of time.

Some of these trips can be recalled even from a distance of decades later. I suppose that, without quite thinking about it, I’ve been collecting these trips for years, adding each one in turn to my memory’s attic, like a rare coin.

After the thoroughly satisfying experience of seeing “District 9” (a very thoughtful and entertaining movie, assuming you’re not the sort of person who gets all squeamish at the sight of alien weaponry causing people to pop open like grapes and spatter into vivid little red globules of blood and viscera), my friend Cynthia and I had a drink afterward to discuss the film.

Our bartender was a very sweet and friendly young woman who was – from both appearance and accent – clearly of Eastern European origin. After we’d talked with her for a while, she asked us our names. We introduced ourselves, and returned the favor by asking her what her name was.

“Maria”, she replied. Then we asked her where she was from, and she said “Russia”, which made sense, given her appearance and accent. But the name Maria wasn’t the first one we would have guessed – I think we’d both been expecting something like Olga or Anya or Tatyana.

It turns out that Maria is a fairly common name in Russia, although neither Cynthia nor I were aware of this. I think we’d both been associating this name with Natalie Wood’s character in “West Side Story”. Which is ironic, because it turns out that Natalie Wood’s mother, a Russian immigrant, was named Maria Stepanova.

So we asked our friendly bartender how she came to have the name “Maria”. “It’s a Jewish name” was her answer. This threw us for a loop. In New York “Maria” is not known as a Jewish name. Yes, there are many Jews in New York whose families came from Russia, but neither of us had ever met one named Maria. In any case, it didn’t seem likely we were talking to one. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to judge people from appearance, but the combination of facial features and blonde hair did not cry out “Russian Jewish immigrant” to either of us.

“Are you Jewish?” I asked. “No,” she replied, in her charming accent. “But I have researched it. Maria, this is a Jewish name.”

“Really?” we both asked, intrigued.

“Yes,” she explained. “Maria. It is the name of mother of the God.”

“Ah,” we both replied, nodding our heads cheerfully, before quickly steering the conversation to other topics.

Today, for the first time, I experienced a really satisfying video teleconferencing experience. I wasn’t expecting to. After all, like many people reading this blog I have had years of unsatisfying and somewhat uncomfortable experiences of teleconferencing. Skype chat, and before that iChat and its cousins, all promise more than they deliver. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has deliberately turned off his video capability, because the results are just too jarring and disappointing.

But today a friend of mine, who works for the network company CISCO, invited me to a little demo, in which we talked for an hour to a friend/colleague in San Francisco over a high quality video teleconferencing hook-up. Having spent all these years being disappointed by video teleconferencing experiences, I wasn’t expecting much.

Except this time it was different. This time, I felt as though I was having a completely comfortable conversation with somebody who was three thousand miles away. Not that everything was perfect. For example you still don’t have the experience of looking into each others’ eyes – that would require each participant to look at the camera, rather than at the image of the other person on the screen. Or some technological fix to adjust the apparent aim point of the pupils – something that would be quite difficult to do reliably well.

But seeing somebody you know at life size, on a high end 65″ diagonal LCD screen, through a high quality video camera, with guaranteed 30 frames per second video, and good quality audio that is actually synchronized to the video, turns out to make the difference. We all actually felt as though we were simply having a conversation, as opposed to “accessing technology”. We all agreed that we’d be perfectly comfortable having meetings over this medium on a daily basis – something none of us had been expecting to be able to say before the demo.

Of all of the aspects of this demo, the one that I think was the most important was the excellent synchronization of video and audio. There seemed to be zero delay. Intellectually, I knew this was highly implausible, given the current state of technology. And yet, there it was.

So I tried an experiment. I told my friend in San Francisco to count to ten with me. I told him I would say “one … three … five … seven … nine”, and I asked him to fill in with the even numbers as quickly as he could. The results were interesting. What I and the people in the room with me heard was:

one … two three … four five … six seven … eight nine … ten

But what my friend in San Francisco heard was:

one two … three four … five six … seven eight … nine ten

Based on the lengths of the pauses, we concluded that there was about a half a second delay in the transmission. And yet, for any other communication, we simply could not detect this delay. Conversation seemed perfectly normal in every way.

For the remainder of the session we were all aware of this delay, and yet we could not detect it. It was unquestionably there, and yet the experience we all had was that there was no delay – a surprising result that I found to be quite intriguing.

The conclusion I reached was that even a half a second delay is essentially unnoticeable, if you have excellent time synchronization between audio and video. Given sight and sound signals arriving at exactly the same time, and in the absence of any other artifacts disrupting the flow of time, the human mind seems to just gloss over the delay, as people automatically adjust their flow of conversational turn-taking to compensate.

How surprising and delightful! For the first time, I am hopeful that in the future there will be truly useful video teleconferencing for everyone.

Yesterday I described the distinction between (i) an actual artistic process, and (ii) games that create an illusion of artistic creation. Whether we’re talking about “Spore” or “Guitar Hero”, essentially it’s the difference between creating a picture and playing color-by-numbers.

By the way, one of my favorite examples of such an entertaining illusion was one of the very first Java applets to appear on the Web back in 1994, Paul Haeberli’s delightful The Impressionist.

But a much more interesting question is how a game might employ such an entertaining illusion as a scaffolding device, to gradually lead the player from mere entertainment to true artistic creation. For example, imagine a game that starts out – in its first levels – as color-by-numbers, and then gradually changes through successive levels, eventually becoming a platform for the true creation of original artistic work.

Similarly, one could imagine a game that starts out guiding its player through simple melody matching challenges on a musical keyboard, and gradually morphs into an experience in which the player is called upon to create truly original music. In any case, we are talking about a sort of “training wheels” for easing the novice artist into a true creative experience.

I could see this general rhetorical device as an approach to learning that could be both fun and effective – if properly designed. Is such a thing really possible? I’ve been trying to think of examples, but so far with little success. One problem is that software designed to entertain and software designed to teach are generally very different. The former promises a maximum of engaging fun, whereas the latter is supposed to be “good for you”. The two agendas are so different that they are rarely if ever combined successfully into a single package.

Maybe we can change that.

The title of this post was the motto of the “Craft Master paint-kit” – the first color-by-numbers product. Invented by Dan Robbins in 1950 (based on an idea from Leonardo DaVinci), these kits clearly filled a need, selling more than twelve million units in their first three years.

There is a recent – and to me much welcome – trend among computer game providers to update Robbins’ idea, rhetorically positioning the player as an artist. When you play “Guitar Hero” you are in the ostensible position of being a musician. “Spore” gives you an experience of designing your own fabulous creatures. “Little Big Planet” takes the ultimate rhetorical step and positions you as a designer of computer game levels.

All games like this have several things in common – they are fun to play, they are thought provoking in concept, and they are, at core, completely fake. I don’t mean “fake” in a bad way. I mean that they share a mandate to be consumer entertainment products, so their mission is to give you the illusion that you are engaging in an artistic process.

But it is only an illusion. When you peer even a little behind the scenes, you find that it’s all color-by-numbers: A team of talented people has carefully crafted a set of pathways for the player to take. Because that team has built a great deal of artfully concealed content beforehand, the experience of a player is really engaged in a kind of mix and match of work that has been done by others. This creates a feeling in the player of magical empowerment, so that every choice produces an interesting outcome.

When you play with “Spore”‘s creature creator, you can get some of the sense of this (although it’s fun to pretend otherwise). Behind the scenes, the folks at Maxis are simply providing menus of choices, and result of your decisions as a game player is essentially to fill out that menu. Those choices are used by the game engine to trigger and select amongst work that was already built by hard-working artists and animators.

Sure, you can create a ten legged creature in “Spore”, but your creation moves a lot like a four legged creature. Not surprising, since the movement you are seeing is (very brilliantly done) window dressing over a simple core template. The result is very different from what would be produced by, say, an animator from Weta lovingly working out the individual motion for each leg of a rampaging alien decipod.

I like this trend not because it is actually empowering (it isn’t) but because it might create some curiosity in the minds of consumers about the real thing. Playing “Guitar Hero” is not an actual experience with a musical instrument, but it might lead more than a few kids to pick up a guitar and check out what it’s like to truly master an instrument.

It may be illuminating to divide products into tools for real artistic creation, versus ersatz art, entertainment products that exist to provide an enjoyable fantasy of an artistic process. Anything you do with “Little Big Planet” or “Spore”, for all the apparent sophistication of the experience, is going to result in a characteristic aesthetic, since you are actually engaged in a – quite fun and engaging – process of shuffling around content that was already made by others.

Whereas real artist’s tools are often strikingly simple. A humble lump of clay is the most protean of tools. I’ve seen a talented artist pick up a piece of plasticine and proceed to create figures of heartbreaking beauty. The same sort of thing can happen with a six string guitar or a movie camera.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy playing “ersatz art” computer games. But give me a good mechanical pencil, a Pink Pearl eraser, and an 8½” &#215 11″ sheet of plain white paper, and I’m in heaven.

I haven’t been writing here about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock because there has already been plenty of ink spilled on the topic. Certainly I understand the attraction. For a highly self-aware generation it was the one moment when the ideals were matched by the reality. A belief in peace and good fellowship, a vision of unhesitating friendliness and mutual helpfulness between total strangers, these were the core tenets of that generation’s political belief system. And for one weekend everybody actually got it right.

But today is something else. Today is the fortieth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix playing our national anthem on the closing morning of Woodstock. I’m not nearly old enough to have been there, but older people I knew who were at the festival have told me it was a transcendent moment – perhaps the transcendent moment – of the three day event.

What I like about the image of Hendrix playing “The Star Spangled Banner” is that it was a choice not to focus on protest of the government’s policies, as much of the popular music did at that time. The performance transcended political issues entirely, and sent a much more profound message out to the young crowd.

Whatever one’s politics, playing the national anthem at a moment like this – a defining moment of an American generation – and in a beautifully operatic and definitively rock and roll style – was a perfect gesture toward the future, a reminder that ultimately the idea of a nation as a force for good in the world must be embraced anew in each generation. If you think your parents got it wrong, then it’s up to you to try to get it right.

I love the fact that this particular concert, held during a time of such bitter national turmoil, was concluded on a note of affirmation. Not a rejection of our national identity, which would have been all too easy – but a promise to uphold and stand up for its better ideals.

When I was a kid television was something that arrived in measured doses. Your favorite TV show came around only once a week, and that was that. Sure, you could keep the TV on and watch whatever came on the screen, but you knew you were just killing time – not watching something you really liked.

Things started shifting when TiVO came around, and then they continued to shift with streaming NetFlix. But I think there is something fundamental and historically unprecedented going on now, with the rise of Hulu. For the first time television offers a true economy of abundance – years and years of free TV (“free” in the sense of commercial sponsored) of sufficient quality and quantity that there is literally more instant television at no cost that you might genuinely want to watch than there are hours in the day.

In other words, if you like TV (and not everyone does) you can see all the episodes of an insanely large assortment of shows stretching back through the decades. Whatever you’re into, be it “Firefly”, “My So-called Life”, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, “The Simpsons”, “Dragnet”, “Lost”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Kings”, “The Office”, “McCale’s Navy” or “My Mother the Car”, it really doesn’t matter – whatever your taste in TV, there is now an unbelievably vast abundance of free content just a click away.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand it’s great – information wants to be free. On the other hand, I wonder whether we might see the emergence a new level of addiction to the medium. If you are a TV addict, you can now, quite literally, spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, watching shows that are of genuine interest to you, until you die. The free content will simply outlast you.

For most of us this is not a problem. But for some people, it might be the equivalent of the bottle of alcohol in the kitchen cabinet – far too much of a temptation.

Might we see the emergence of Huluaholics Anonymous – complete with twelve step programs (hmm, maybe we shouldn’t call them “programs”)? Will people recovering from lost weekends of watching “Fringe” or “Kojak” congregate in secret meetings for group support, identifying themselves to each other only by their first names?

There must be a way out of this, someway to forestall the trend before masses of hollow-eyed TV addicts begin to roam the cities, clutching their laptops in desperation, doomed to an endless search for the next WiFi connection.

Wait, I know. Maybe we can start a channel that offers free video games.

Spending time today with my two year old nephew Thomas, I realize that the two year olds are not unformed versions of us – they are something completely different. They have an entirely different way of seeing the world, and their eyes focus on different things. What delights and enthralls them is often meaningless to us.

They focus on particular details – where the line is on the pavement, how many cookies everyone has, how many times to run around the pole – that are from another world, one we can see but not really understand.

I think it’s not so much the difference in the way their minds work – although the non-linear spontaneously generative thinking of a two year old seems completely different from the relatively linear narrative within an adult mind. It’s the fact that entirely different things motivate them. The aspects of reality that most delight a small child – the sounds, colors, endless repetitions of games – are largely inaccessible to our adult minds.

Thomas can switch his attention on a dime from one thing to another without another thought. On the other hand, he can watch a guitarist play for an hour or more, gazing in rapt attention at the fingers of the musician while listening to the magical sounds that emerge, without ever losing focus for a moment. I understand this, but I cannot do it. It’s another world, one only vaguely accessible to our adult minds. We can peer in through the glass, and perhaps even make sense of many of the things we see there, but we cannot step through, into this other world.

Went with some friends this evening to a comedy club. Before the headline performer (who was amazing) there was a procession of semi-professional comics – either young kids just getting started, or semi-professionals who were clearly never going to go anywhere.

It was most instructive to watch the really bad acts. A gifted and experienced comedian is so good at creating a flow state in the room, that you tend not to notice it being done. You’re just floating on the vibe, and it all seems seamless and (misleadingly) effortless.

But a bad comedian is a lesson in how hard it is to establish that control, to create the proper vibe in a room. When you see somebody dying up there, trying one joke after another and starting to get that look of panic in their eyes when none of it is hitting, you’re seeing a lot more than an out of control act. You’re seeing a implied contract being broken – the contract whereby the performer has told the audience, simply by virtue of being up there and picking up a microphone, “don’t worry, I’m here, I’ll take care of you”.

Interestingly, one young comedian in the lineup was either genuinely insane or else trying deliberately not to be funny. I couldn’t figure out whether I was seeing somebody who hadn’t a clue what humor is, or the next Andy Kaufman, deliberately deconstructing the process.

The audience started to get nervous when he made an unfunny joke about Obama eating fried chicken in the White House (that one was apparently directed toward the young black couple in the front row), but people really started to freak out when it appeared that he was about to tell a joke at the expense of Sarah Palin’s baby – the one with Down’s Syndrome. He veered away from that just in time, and then spent the remainder of his act publicly embarrassing and humiliating his own father, who was in the audience.

I found myself wondering whether it was all deliberate. The act seemed far to bizarre to simply be the result of incompetence. Perhaps we’re seeing the birth of a new kind of theatre of the absurd. Or as Artaud might have put it, a kind of theatre of cruelty – a deliberate attempt to force us to see the turmoil, anger and pain beneath the surface, the generally unacknowledged raw meat of alienation that goes into the sausage of comedy.

Or maybe the guy was just nuts.