Why is the humble umbrella such a conundrum?  Can we not come up with a design that can open, close, fit in a purse, and withstand a certain degree of bluster?

Having spent a day battling New York winds and rains, I am stumped at the imperfections of this essential object.  I propose that we invite James Dyson to take on this design challenge.  Having perfected the vacuum cleaner and the fan and hand dryer, surely he could solve the brolly crisis?

And then, can we develop an app to locate our lost umbrellas?  I quickly scoured the app store and couldn’t find anything.  Presumably, the Dyson umbrella would be engraved with a unique QR code that could be scanned and geo-located.  Right?  And then a stranger would find said umbrella and a service would provide envelopes so we could mail umbrellas back to each other.  Did I just give away my million-dollar idea?

I would also like to invent the tea temperature alarm.  A thermometer that would tell you when your tea is at perfect drinking temperature (adjustable to personal preference) and then you wouldn’t let it go cold.

What else would ease your daily existence?  Can we give up our day jobs and set up a daily design collective to focus on perfecting the little things?

Generally, I can tell the difference between “news” and an ad. It’s not that hard; usually near the ads there’s some sort of notice identifying certain information as sponsored by some company or other. I try to avoid the sponsored links, because I know that clicking on one will not only make somebody some money off of my viewing, but that very often my computer will accept a cookie that may track my activities. I don’t know about you, but I just find it creepy to be tracked like this. Not that I do anything terribly illegal (well, mostly) when I’m on line, but I just, well, don’t like the idea of someone keeping track of the pages I peruse.

Side bar for a thought experiment! What if some store owners somehow, unbeknownst to you, tagged you electronically when you were in their store and tracked you around for a few days or weeks afterward to observe what you did and what you bought? Even if it were for your own good, you know, to help improve how the business world serves you, I bet you’d feel a bit creeped out, right? If you put it this way, I think more people would strongly support anti-tracking cookie legislation.

Anyhoo, today I noticed two columns of stories side by side under the story I had just read. One was labeled “More from the Times,” and the other “From around the Web.” At first glance (I think you’ll agree), they appear to be presented on equivalent terms. “Here are some of our stories, and here are some stories from other places.” (Apologies for the size of the image.)

I noticed that one of the stories (not pictured above) in the second column was about how the economy is going to hell and there’s some sort of attendant consumer trend catching on. Lately I’ve had a hunch that the economy is going to hell soon (I mean really, *really* going to hell, and really, *really* soon). It’s not really a hunch that’s exclusive to me, of course. Maybe you, too, have noticed that things don’t seem to be going that well, economy-wise. All the same, I sensed that this story would help me develop my hunch into a theory.

Anyway, of course the second part of the headline link, about how there’s some sort of trend, should have tipped me off that this was not just a news story link, but I guess my guard was a little down because the story was in a column just like the column to the left of it, a column of legitimate news stories. Right?

I was taken to a site with “Money News” in the URL, and the story itself was written in that way that lengthy emails that are trying to sell you something are written. It kept saying the same thing again and again, punctuated with links to some sort of product that would advise the reader on just what to do with her/his money in order not to lose it all in the coming shitstorm.

I knew that I’d been duped, but I kept reading the story anyway, half thinking to myself that maybe this was actually a slightly legitimate news site, like maybe Fox Money News. After I had thoroughly failed to convince myself that the site was anything but an attempt to part me from some of my money, I hit the back arrow and looked more closely at the second column of stories on the LA Times page.

Clicking on the little “[what's this]” link on the lower right brought up a box with the following text. “An Outbrain customer paid to distribute this content. We do our best to ensure that all of the links recommended to you lead to interesting content. To find out more information about driving traffic to your content or to place this widget on your site, visit outbrain.com. We welcome your feedback at feedback@outbrain.com. View our privacy policy here.”

I noticed that some of the stories had more legitimate sounding goals for their readers, imparting important information like why not to ignore “GERD symptoms,” whatever they are. Others were more clearly just blatant propaganda, like the story from “ExxonMobil Perspectives” on how oil companies are stimulating the economy to the tune of $1 trillion.

It occurred to me right then that the wall between “news” and “ads” is highly permeable indeed (if not even non-existent), that the left-hand column, the “More stories from the Times” *are* more or less equivalent to the stories “From around the Web,” that this sort of advertising doesn’t raise its information to the level of news, but helps to bring the news down to the level of advertising. The LA Times, after all, wants me to click on its stories just as much as it wants me to click on those ads. It gets paid for both, right? I know this isn’t exactly a novel thought, but it’s something that I think I often forget when I look at news websites expecting simply to be informed.

Even though the premise seems like a set-up for easy present-bashing in favor of a twisted nostalgia for a period when new music was, you know, good, I’m looking forward to reading Simon Reynolds’ recent book, Retromania. Part of the blurb on Amazon makes it seem like Reynolds simplifies popular culture’s current nostalgia for any era except this one to ask the question, “Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?”

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on Reynolds’ recent Slate article, “The Ghost of Teen Spirit”, I think his argument will be much subtler than this.

My favorite bit from the article (about 3/4 of the way through) argues that current nostalgia for the early 90s is at least partially a product of that decade’s position on the cusp of the internet boom, at the tail end of the dominance of major media outlets that had the power to create a sense of an era. Forgive me for the extensive quote:

[T]he media organs of the analog system generated what you might call the “Epochal Self-Image”: a sense of a particular stretch of years as constituting an era, a period with a distinct “feel” and spirit. That sense is always constructed, always entails the suppression of the countless disparate other things going on in any given stretch of time, through the focus on a select bunch of artists, styles, recordings, events, deemed to “define the times.” If we date the takeoff point of the Internet as a dominant force in music culture to the turn of the millennium (the point at which broadband enabled the explosive growth of filesharing, blogging, et al.), it is striking that the decade that followed is characterized by the absence of epochal character. It’s not that nothing happened … it’s that so many little things happened, a bustle of microtrends and niche scenes that all got documented and debated, with the result that nothing was ever able to dominate and define the era.

The failure is bound-up with the erosion of the filtering function of the media and its increasing inability to marshal and synchronize popular taste around particular artists or phenomena. The Internet works against convergence and consensus: the profusion of narrowcast media (blogs, netradio, innumerable outlets of analysis and opinion) and the accelerated way that news and buzz get disseminated, mean that it is harder and harder for a cultural phenomenon to achieve full-spectrum dominance of the attention economy. Now triumphant, the digital system has interfered with our very sense of culture-time.

This last sentence in particular resonates with me. Our culture delivery system itself now prevents us from having a sense of our own era. *This* is why there’s no song of the summer, people!

Before I go on any further, I should tell you that I’m actually writing this post as a spoken piece which is being transcribed, or has been transcribed, I should say, so that is why there is sort of an extreme conversational tone to this post.  So I just wanted to give you the heads up as the reader that that’s actually what’s going on right now as I’m writing this post.  I guess “writing” needs to be in quotes.

Um, so this post is about the idea of handwriting or handwritten letters versus the idea of digitally represented letters, the kind that you’re reading right now (By letters, I mean a, b, c, and so on, not “Dear Blanche,. . .”).  Again, this post is not intended to be an argument against any of the points that Stella brought up on Friday. . . This post is more about the questions that I think need to be answered when it comes to the idea of handwriting and the representations of words and thoughts via a handwritten letter or manuscript versus the communication that takes place via digitally represented letters and words like the ones that you’re reading now on your computer screen.

The reason that I think this idea is interesting sort of goes back to some thoughts I had a few years ago about conceptual art.  Really, my thoughts were based on this idea that if conceptual art is really based on the idea itself or the concept, then we are actually moving away from the purity of the art when the conceptual piece is actually manufactured as an artifact because we lose the connection to the concept.  We use different senses than we might if we were just told about the concept or if we read about the concept.

So when we’re actually viewing a piece of conceptual art, we are sort of removed by at least one step from the concept itself.  So again, in my opinion, there’s a loss of the communication between the artist and the viewer of the purity of the concept.  Or the purity of the concept is clouded through the production of an artifact.

Another thing, or the reason I think this is an important point to bring up, and I’ve had this conversation before, when we talk about the idea of the death of the handwritten note or the handwritten letter, we often talk about this idea of there being a degree of intimacy lost in the communication when it comes to the handwritten letter versus a digitally manufactured and digitally delivered letter, say an email or an instant message or a text.

So if the point of a letter, a handwritten letter, is intimacy of communication, then the ultimate question is whether handwritten letters bring us a greater intimacy or a more intimate experience than digitally manufactured letters do.  And I would actually argue that this is not the case.  Or, I would at least argue that it is not exactly the case.

Okay.  So I would like to discuss very briefly the idea or the experience of a handwritten letter. Really, it has 3 parts.  A person writes it, a little time passes and it is delivered by someone else as time is passing, and finally the intended recipient reads the letter.  That’s you or me, the one who gets the letter.  Now the recipient, because what we’re talking about here is really the recipient, right? The person who’s reading the handwritten letter or is reading words that are represented on a computer screen. The recipient experiences a large degree of intimacy in a handwritten letter, but I argue that this is completely self-manufactured intimacy.  It must be so since the letter’s author is likely off somewhere else experiencing thoughts and emotions that are nowhere near connected to those that he or she was experiencing when he actually wrote the letter.  So the intimacy that the recipient of the letter is feeling is a one-way street.  Likely, probably, a one-way street. Again, the person who wrote the letter might be at work, might be stuck in traffic, might be writing a letter to someone else and is likely not feeling those feelings at that moment that he or she was when he or she wrote the letter.

So I would argue that what we are feeling in reality, the intimacy that we are feeling is really a connection to the letter itself, the physical object, not to the person who wrote it. In other words, it is the physical object or as I said the letter itself and not the pure experience of the letters’ contents.

Now the letter’s contents essentially are the feelings and thoughts that the person who wrote it was having at the time that they wrote it.  And you are removed from that experience by holding a letter in your hand. You’re thinking about their handwriting, you’re imagining what that person looked like when they wrote it maybe, what the expression on their face was, what time of day it was, what the light maybe was like in the room whwn they wrote it, or what the room itself looked like.  But you’re moved away from the actual words of the letter itself or the contents of the letter. The communication. Because that what letters are, right, they are supposed to be communication and in this case they’re supposed to be intimate communication.  Because that’s really what we’re talking about here.

So going back to the example that I brought up earlier of conceptual art, remember if it is the art, rather if the concept that is the art then the artifact works to move the viewer farther away from the art itself.  The viewer is experiencing a sensory reaction to an object, not an experience based purely on the concept.

Okay. Now let’s look at digital forms of communication.   The letters that you are seeing on your computer screen do not actually exist. They are, in fact, created by chains of zeroes and ones, or, more technically, they are created through tiny switches either being switched on or switched off.  In other words, unless you print this post they are not letters at all, but you are reading them as if they were.

So this leads to the obvious question: does it necessarily mean that the reader is somehow experiencing a purer communication via a computer screen than she or he would through a written letter?

If you have been following along so far, then the answer is yes.  This is because you are likely sitting in the same spot and looking at the same screen upon which you calculate your taxes, send emails, do instant messaging, and read or visit any number of websites.  So what I’m getting at is that you reading this post is not, physically speaking, a unique experience. You are not holding a handwritten, one-of-a-kind piece of paper. So you can experience a less removed understanding of my concepts.  Or a purer understanding of my concepts.

Another reason that I’d argue that the digital version of communication brings a greater degree of intimacy is based on the time factor. If a greater degree of intimacy is achieved when two or more people are communicating in real time, then it makes sense that instant messaging or texting is without a doubt a purer form of intimate  communication. In other words, you’re experiencing the joy; you are LOLing, as it were, while the other person is likely LOLing and whatnot.

So as we lament the death of handwriting, I further suggest that we consider what it actually is.  It actually is simply a form of communication that at one time was a technological miracle, much the same as our contemporary technological miracles.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that as we move farther away from the tradition of handwriting manuscripts, letters, and notes, I’m sure it will make momentary resurgences among the youth, much the same way that knitting or gardening has and will continue to do so in a cyclical fashion.

Finally I would argue that we have certainly created a wonderful community around the digital representation of letters through The Great Whatsit. Remember all the feelings that you’ve had, all the connections that you’ve had to all the other authors in the Great Whatsit community; you’ve never seen, or you’ve likely never seen, handwritten versions of our posts, even if posts were written on notebooks as some are–I know that I’ve written a couple in longhand–but really what you’re reading are just  digital representations of letters, not actual letters themselves. The end.

Learning to write was a chore.  Not the concept or meaning, but the labored formation of letters to meet the expectations of teachers.  As a six-year-old, I was kept back during break to practice my handwriting.  The teacher reminded me that in our exercise book, each line intended for handwriting had a second horizontal line above it.  The lower case letters were to fit below and only the upper case letters were empowered to cross this magic, foreboding halfway line.  I knew this was not the full story, but questions were not welcome.  I sweated to keep my tiny “h”s below the halfway line, knowing that I was stunting their elegant growth.  My “t’s squatted.  And my “l”s were confused with “i”s.  My faithful adherence to instruction was not rewarded.

Fountain pens were a new challenge.  What is not elegant in pencil will only be heavier in ink and blots bloomed like flowers.  But eventually that strong nib and enforced practice formalizes all scrawl.

In college (yes even in the late 80s) we turned in handwritten work.  I had heard of the computer lab but couldn’t imagine why I would spend time there.  Up until that point, all my communication was scribed, physically imprinted on to a textured surface…homework, poems, shopping lists, letters to distant grandparents, love notes.

A while ago, a friend’s college-age son wrote me a card to go with a thank you gift.  The writing was in shaky caps.  Two decades ago, I would have assumed he was illiterate.

I am not a Luddite, but I just watched the animated movie The Secret of Kells where ninth-century Irish monks labor over the creation of one of the world’s most beautiful books.

Will we ever want to create such a thing again?  Will young people experience the delight of communications intentionally crafted with lead and ink?  Will they have the chance to rifle through old boxes of letters and notes and cards and look nostalgically at the handwriting of someone they love?