Skateboarding In Schools? Who Would've Thought!

My commentary today is on another Pioneer Press article, this one written about the incorporation of skateboards into the physical education curriculum. A school has spent over $3000 on boards, helmets and pads for the kids to use to learn skateboarding in class. Educators cite the childhood obesity epidemic and kids’ perceived waning interest in school as reasons to bring something hip and fresh into the classroom. And skateboarding, no doubt, is hip and fresh. It seems that 90’s skate culture and the success of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of video games has finally wormed its way into the public school system. Skater punks who could be found grinding away on school property after school, despised by the faculty, are now being nurtured by the Man himself.

There’s no question that skating will result in more active kids. As more and more kids become prone to sitting in front of their HDTVs playing Xbox 360 instead of being active and social outdoors, skateboarding at least cracks open the door to a more active lifestyle. A main goal of the program is to introduce an exciting activity that kids can do even when their friends aren’t around. This is good. That being said, I do have some reservations about the program.

First, and probably least in the educators’ minds, is the cost of skateboarding. For any other sport you need a ball. Maybe a racket, net or stick as well. But for skating, you need a board, helmet, kneepads, elbowpads, and wrist guards. That’s not only a lot of equipment to buy , but it’s a lot to store and keep track of when not in use.

Secondly, I don’t know that I like solitary activities being introduced in P.E. Phys. Ed was always about learning to do stuff as a team, fostering cooperation, and learning how to win as well as how to lose. I can’t think of any school sport that is not team based. Even sports like track, cross country, wrestling, and bowling are done in teams. Learning how to work in a team is something that everyone needs to learn how to do, and every minute spent skateboarding is one less spent participating on team.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, skateboarding is a blatant glorification of youth culture. You can skate until a certain age, and then you simply can’t any longer. And that age is usually in your late twenties. Of all the kids in my class who skated in middle and high school, I can’t think of a single one who is still doing it. The Friday night basketball games where men of all ages, from 20 to 60, can play and compete and have fun just aren’t possible with skateboarding. I know, I know, you can say the same thing about football, wrestling, and a bunch of other sports - that older people can’t play them. But at least in those sports older people can still demonstrate skills and techniques, even if they can’t do them at full speed. Coaching is still a very real possibility. I think it would be really hard to do any kind of serious coaching when you yourself can no longer even ollie.

A fourth issue that I will just briefly mention is that skateboarding has traditionally been a very rebellious sort of activity. The whole lifestyle, from board art to skate mags, is loud, rough, and raucous. Maybe this is changing, maybe not. I don’t know. But it is something we should consider or at least look into if we want to teach all kids how to skate.

I hope this program works out. I really do. A lot of money has been invested to the sake of the kids. But caution must be taken when presenting it to them as a viable alternative to traditional sports, because skateboarding is not that. It is an extreme sport, and rightly so. The culture is fast and furious, the rate of injury high, the entry cost significant, and the windows of participation intense and brief. Skateboarding certainly has fared better than rollerblading or BMX riding, but it remains a sport that I think should be undertaken at one’s own risk, and then only out of one’s own curiosity and interest.




_DZ

A Wave of Psychologically Distressing Entertainment On The Internet

In the 1930s cultural and literary critic Walter Benjamin penned his observation of mankind”s “self-alienation [having] reached such a degree that it [could] experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” He was referring to destructive practices that we find commonplace today; things like building a full movie set only to blow it up in a stunt. It was waste, pure and simple, but the moviegoers loved it. And because it was profitable, it stayed. Nowadays we don’t think twice about chase scenes in which hundreds of car get totaled - it’s just good cinema!


But I think he was onto something, and I want to take his observation and apply it to a new, disturbing phenomenon that is growing in todays Internet culture. It seems to be everywhere you browse, and thanks in part to the anonymous and unfiltered nature of the Web, is growing quickly. I’m referring here to the trends of scathing satire, celebration of deviance, a pathological focus on negative events, and dark humor. The glamorous trivialization of the depraved human condition that looms over our psychological well-being.

Now the content of this wave is not new per se. Throughout history we have laughed at one another’s misfortunes, enjoyed violence as entertainment, and in general indulged in activities that were not helpful in our development as a loving, caring race. Dead baby jokes are still told. What has changed, however, is the way that this content is distributed, the scope of its reach, and the way in which we as a(n) (internet) culture participate in it.

Before I start listing examples, I want to emphasize that all of the content that I will reference is available for free, online. There is no cost involved other than a computer and an Internet connection. This is a major point, because before the Internet the only way that someone could reach a large audience was to publish in some way or another, whether it be books, magazines, film, or syndication. This not only involved some degree of scrutinizing censorship, but it cost money and, accordingly, consuming it cost a person money. Before indulging in any material, the consumer had to judge whether or not the entertainment he would gain was worth the value of his money. This was an important step that is now bypassed thanks to the Web. Social site-aggregator sites like Reddit.com and Digg.com help to popularize this content, making it easy to find for people who are looking for a quick laugh.

Dark Humor Comics

This genre of comics has exploded in the past couple years, with sites such as garfieldminusgarfield, Perry Bible Fellowship, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Cyanide and Happiness quickly gaining thousands of subscribers. These comics focus on themes such as depression, isolation, death, mental illness, suicide, often portraying their depiction and satire of real life in the light of extreme irony. They are colorfully drawn, and hide their disturbing content behind the smiling faces of their characters. They provide the reader with his or her daily dose of dark humor derived from the dysfunctional areas of daily life.



Dark Humor Cartoons

These aren’t as popular as they used to be (at least I think so), but they are also along the same lines, in terms of subject material, as the dark humor comics. These animated shorts on sites like HappyTreeFriends.com and Killfrog.com feature slapstick violence way above the level of Tom & Jerry and often surpassing controversial cartoons like South Park. Explosions often result in maiming, dismemberment, and death of small animals or humans. Again, these are cartoons that would never be able to turn a profit on TV or even straight-to-DVD releases and can exist only on the Internet, where teens and college students can watch them and laugh. The YouTube channel of MondoMedia, the creators of Happy Tree Friends (whose videos are too disturbing for me to embed here), has been viewed over seven million times, with their cumulative video view count no doubt in the twenty to thirty million range or higher.

Satire/Fratire

Sometimes people get really drunk and do stupid things. Most of the time those aren’t things you want to talk about, unless you are a “fratire” writer. This is a genre of prose in which the writer is dedicated to getting really drunk and recording every outrageously socially insensitive thing he (they’re almost always male) does (thanks to a tape recorder he takes with him). Thanks to blogging, these writers’ sites become popular destinations for college-aged guys who need a partying role-model of sorts. A guy named Tucker Max, a self-proclaimed asshole, is undoubtedly the most popular writer of this genre, even producing a book entitled I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. Max knows how to write a funny story, and uses his relationship blunders and drunken sexual escapades as “good” subject material. Fratire is excellent example in which a writer gets famous only because of the nature of the Internet. Tucker is now a prominent New York socialite, though new stories have been added to his site less and less frequently. The aim of these sites, such as TuckerMax.com and SlowChildren-AtPlay.com, is never to educate anyone - only to shock and “impress” the reader.


At-Least-My-Life-Isn’t-That-Bad Sites

Complaining to friends about how life seems unfair at times is something we all do at one time or another. We all need to vent and be comforted. Most of the time these stories of woe are not particularly humorous, but when then are, we laugh at them. And when the Internet comes into the picture, thousands of people can laugh at them. Enter FMyLife.com, a site to which people can upload short stories of how their day went wrong, ending each story with three letters: FML. F*** My Life. A site that people can visit in order to laugh at the misfortunes of others and even rate those unfortunate experiences (“Did the subject deserve it or not?”). A site that, thanks to the anonymity and impulsive nature of the Internet, allows people to publish how their professional lives, personal lives, relational exchanges, and sexual escapades went awry. Each story is meant to evoke a “Haha! I would hate to be that guy!” type of response from the reader. And there are over 2200 of these stories, with about 15 new ones being added every day. It used to be that teen and gossip magazines had a monopoly on these tales of rueful woe - now they’re everywhere.

Another site in the same vein is the aptly-named Complainary.com, which touts itself as a place for people to vent. Not content to merely feature paragraph-length stories, the Complainary actually hosts whole articles and blog entries dedicated to ranting about how much things suck. Very little of the material is even remotely constructive, and Complainary is actively recruiting people to write for the site, clearly trying to push the complain-anonymously-online movement along.

These examples are just a taste of all the distressing content that is out there; a mere drop in the digital bucket. Economics would tell us that the market is just catering to the needs to the consumers, i.e. where the market senses a demand for a service or product, it will create something for the demand to consume. So, in a way, the blame could be placed on the people who supposedly desire this kind of entertainment. The resulting dark humor must be just a passive product of the masses wants and desires. I don’t agree with this, because I don’t believe that traditional economics apply here. The Internet is the first place in human history where people can reach a mass audience for next to free. Consequentially, this allows them to do their own thing and make content that they want to make. The argument becomes, “Because the audience on the Internet is so expansive, if I put out content, surely someone who likes it will find it. They will then tell their friends, and the chain continues.” Thus, someone who makes (subjectively) decent content, like dark humor comics, can effectively create an artificial demand for their service with no risk involved. If they become popular enough, then they can branch out and actually try to make a living off of their site, whether that be by selling advertising space, clothing, or other merchandise that relates to their site. Truly this is entrepreneurship at its finest.

And this is not going away. For perhaps the first time, artists who were told, “You will never make any money drawing those silly comics,” actually can. Being paid for doing what you love is incredibly enticing, and people will flock to this opportunity.

But, nonetheless, I worry about our collective psychological well-being. The rise in depression and isolation in the past several years is brought on, I think in part, by our attachment to our machines. It’s no secret that art is reflective of the time period in which if was created, and as print comics die and webcomics flourish, their gravitation towards the dark themes in life, and our derivation of pleasure from it, is just a natural byproduct of our society. And thanks to the Internet, it proliferates rapidly. And what about fratire, FML, and The Complainary; trends that celebrates human deviance and misfortune? Will they continue to grow?

I certainly hope not.




_DZ

Matthew 7:11

¹¹If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

April is the month of every year with the highest number of suicides, so be nice to your neighbors. If you have an encouraging word to spare, say it.

Thank you.

-Dann

I Miss You, Paul Harvey

I’ve been slow to write about it, but radio commentator Paul Harvey died a little over a month ago. Known for his morning news segment on NPR, Paul was a real character who knew not only how to entertain but also how to make issues that seemed not to matter to the forefront of discussion.

NPR and Paul Harvey were, quite literally, the soundtrack to my childhood mornings. That alone probably tells you more about my parents than a full page of text ever could, but whatever. Every day I would wake up at 7am and go downstairs for breakfast, plunking myself down with my bowl of Cheerios and fruit as NPR (Camille Bohannon and Robert Siegel) streamed over the airwaves of Armed Forces Radio. Paul Harvey came on at 7:15, and his Rest Of The Story played around 7:30. After that came the Letterman Top Ten List. Programming like that tells you all you need to know about Armed Forces Radio.

Paul Harvey was a comfort for me - a security blanket. A sense that everything was OK in the world, sometimes. He was also in a way my link to America, and I took cues from him and the news he delivered as representative of the country that with I (at the time) most strongly identified. I heard his voice so much over the course of my elementary years that whenever I read the news now, I can hear Paul’s voice in my head, reading it to me if I so choose.

I will miss him.



_DZ

Games As A Part of Mainstream Culture - What Are We To Do?

Ever since I graduated high school, the mainstream acceptance of video gaming has given rise to a ubiquitous culture that revolves around games and gaming in general. Initially fueled by a handful of websites such as GameFAQs, IGN, 1Up, and Penny-Arcade and magazines like PC Gamer and Nintendo Power, the gaming revolution has exploded in the last year, producing pieces of shrapnel like gamer chairs, Gamer Grub, G4 TV and a gamer line of razors.

As games become a integral part of our culture and artistic expression, many people liken them to other cultural products like TV shows, novels, popular music CDs, and movies. But is this correct? Have games really achieved that level of status and cultural recognition? Is buying the new Madden game every September just as important as seeing a major summer blockbuster? Is Grand Theft Auto as popular as Britney?

Good games certainly have a pedigree, and throughout the short history of games there are ones that are looked on as iconic genre definers. Half-Life, Tomb Raider, Super Mario World, Pac-Man, GoldenEye, Mario Kart, Zelda : Ocarina of Time, Quake, Doom. All of these are classics of the video game culture; the Rockys, Star Wars, Gone With The Winds, and King Kongs of their genre. Regardless of production values, special effects, or story lines, gamers look to them as the hallmarks of good gaming.

And, just like movies, books, and music, games keep being made, released, and enjoyed by people all over the world. But isn’t their something different about games? On one hand they look like a movie, but they play through like a book. And there is always music on the background. A game encompasses a lot of other media forms, and delivers its content in a nice, programmed package. This should be good for us - after all, we now have film, story, and music on one package. But do we take games as seriously as all that? The trend in culture sure indicates that we do.

But where is the social aspect of gaming? Where are the gaming clubs, the dollar game nights, and the Nintendo discos? Why aren’t retro games as celebrated as classic movies or 1920’s jazz music? Why has it taken games longer to reach the majority of the population? I think there are several reasons.

The primary reason is that games run on specific hardware. Unlike movies that would all play in a VCR or DVD player, games were locked to the consoles that they were made for. The recent increase in popularity has a lot to do with more games going cross-platform. The same game is now available on more than one machine, and therefore is more accessible to a larger audience. Hardware tethering, incidentally, has a lot to do with retro games falling out of the public eye. As more and more retro consoles bite the dust, games that are still very playable have nothing to be played on, and thus sit around and collect dust. Retro game emulation and archiving has helped a lot in this area, and needs to continue if we want to save games as part of our cultural history.

Another reason is that games are interactive. They require time to learn and developers usually vary the control scheme from game to game, thus not guaranteeing that being good at one game means being good at another game like it. This can get frustrating. Being interactive also means that games take much longer to complete than a movie takes to watch or a CD does to listen to. Twenty to thirty hours is not uncommon, with some role playing games requiring upwards of seventy hours. This is a lot of commitment, and means that you cannot go through 10 games as quickly as you can watch ten movies.

Being interactive has an impact on the third reason, which is that gamers don’t necessarily like to cross genres. While some casual gamers play sports, racing, and action games, others may play only first-person shooter or real-time strategy games. Music lovers have CDs spanning many different genres, just like movie buffs have films spanning such classifications as action, romance, comedy, horror, or drama.

We are at a crossroads. On one hand, games are certainly a part of our lives, part of out culture, and part of our media. On the other hand, we’re not about to start dedicating spaces in public libraries to house game collections. We still see games as largely a juvenile, time-wasting, low-class art form. Some of you even shuddered when I called it an art form.

So what do we do when our companies are pouring millions of dollars into an industry that we don’t want to recognize as a legitimate repository of cultural value? If games are here to stay, why we don’t feel like preserving them and in doing so creating a visible historical timeline of where we have come from as a gamer culture? Will computer games just turn out to be a fad that eventually dies out? I don’t think so. We as a society have to find ways of making games that aren’t locked to hardware platforms, that are enjoyable for people of all ages, and, most importantly, are worth preserving.





_DZ

How the BitTorrent Protocol Works (and some stuff about copyright)

With popular BitTorrent sites MiniNova and The Pirate Bay both in the news recently over allegations of copyright infringement, today seems like a good opportunity to discuss the rise of the BitTorrent protocol. Since I know next to nothing about copyright law, I will instead talk about something I know a little about - how a torrent works.

BitTorrent, at its most basic definition, is a way to share files over a computer network. It is in an improvement on the direct peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs like Kazaa and LimeWire. These programs, enormously popular in the early ‘00s, downloaded complete files linearly from one computer to another and were great ways for people to share MP3 files, software, and maybe the occasional movie or two. Transfer rates of 50~60kbps were the norm (above 90 was excellent), and the biggest recommended file size was about 800-900MB. Most of this content was, and still is, copyrighted, making this sharing largely illegal.

BitTorrent, on the other hand, is a system that allows for files in the multi-gigabyte (1000+ MB) range to be downloaded at speeds of over 900kbps. This is accomplished through the use of a BitTorrent program, or client, and small “.torrent” files.

When a person wishes to share a file via BitTorrent, they create a .torrent file which contains data about the file that they wish to share (a target file). All the .torrent file does is take a picture of the data in the target file, break that picture into a bunch of pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and note the location on the target file on the user’s computer. The user then uploads the torrent file to a tracker website - a place like The Pirate Bay or MiniNova - where other users can then search for the torrent file on a tracker site and download it to their computer. Once they open the torrent file using a BitTorrent client (popular ones include uTorrent and Azureus), the client locates the target file on the original owner’s computer and starts to copy it onto the new computer. Where BitTorrent really shines is when you have a whole bunch of people download the same torrent file and start sharing the same target file.

Remember that the tracker file broke the file into jigsaw pieces? BitTorrent is so efficient because it doesn’t pull a file linearly from one computer to the other - it takes whatever pieces area available as soon as they become available. At first it might have a few corner pieces of a file, then a few edge pieces, and then, bit by bit, it completes the whole puzzle. Well, when there are a whole bunch of people downloading the same file, those pieces start flying in! The client sends requests for piece after to pieces to all the other people sharing the file, and the more people are sharing, the more likely the pieces are available, and the faster the complete file will download and assemble. Where there was a before a blank table, now there is a completed puzzle.

Unlike a puzzle, however, the number of pieces, or, in this case, the size of the file, doesn’t affect how fast the file downloads. What matters is only how many people are making their puzzle available, or seeding. The “health” of a torrent file, that is, how fast it is likely to download, is based on how many seeders (providers) it has versus how many “leechers” (coveters) it has.

In this way, people who torrent form a community. Everyone wants a file to download quickly, but the only way to achieve that is for the file to have a lot of seeders. Thus there is a lot or reciprocity, and it is considered good torrent etiquette to seed many times the amount that you leech. After all, nobody likes leechers who download the file and then close the client program - they aren’t giving back to the community that provides for them.

So we know that torrenting allows a very large amount of data (often copyrighted music, movies, and software) to move freely throughout the Internet, but how can the technology be used legally for something beneficial? I’ll give two examples.

Traditionally if someone, a music artist for example, wanted to give something away for free, they would have to host it on their website. Fans would visit the site and download the music for free, and everyone would be happy - except the hosting site. Since the music (say, 50MB worth) was hosted on the website itself, the sites bandwidth would be used every time a person downloaded the music. The bigger the music file and the more people downloaded it, the bigger the strain on the site would be. Not so with a torrent file. Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails recently collaborated with rockers Jane’s Addiction to release a sampler collection of six tracks called NINJA. The music in the torrent file that I downloaded (at 1340MB/s!) was 162MB large. If that had been hosted on a website, a lowly 10,000 hits would’ve resulted in 1,620,000MB, or 1620GB, of data that had to be transferred. Someone would’ve had to pay for that usage. But by releasing the music as a torrent file, Reznor effectively distributed his music for almost zero dollars.

OpenOffice.Org releases their OpenOffice productivity suite the same way. This collection of tools, including a word processor, spreadsheet program, and presentation software, also tips the scales at about 162MB. OpenOffice keeps their costs down by releasing it as a torrent as well.

Clearly BitTorrent has its advantages for sharing both copyrighted and non-copyrighted material. How the users use it is, or course, not something the creators have control over. As the illegal aspect of it makes the news, more and more people will become aware of it and start to use it. Since it has legal uses, the protocol itself cannot be deemed illegal. What we now have is a powerful tool for information dissemination that cannot be ignored. Rather we have to find more ways to use it constructively and, as a society, perhaps re-think our laws of copyright.



_DZ

Minimalism in The Design of Common Objects

Since I talk about minimalism so much and even have the word included in my site name, I think it’s about time that I write a few articles about the subject. So this is one of them.

I appreciate minimalism because, in a world filled with images and designs all vying for your attention, a minimalist design cuts out the clutter, strips away the unnecessary, and provides a no-frills approach do giving you exactly what you need and letting you do exactly what you want to do. It reduces the choices we have to make while at the same time making it easier for our brains to process information. In a world hyper-saturated with media and graphics and noise and flashing lights, minimalism offers a silent, collected, and hopeful alternative.

Minimalism, at least in relation to design, comes in three different forms. These forms can and often do overlap, but they can be separated into their distinct individual elements. These elements are aesthetic minimalism, functional or utilitarian minimalism, and spatial minimalism.

Aesthetic minimalism is a celebration of the simple design. Iconic logos such of the Mobil pegasus, the Shell shell, the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes, the Target bulls-eye, and the McDonalds arches are simple images that are recognizable the world over without the addition of any text at all. Clean lines, simple shapes, solid colors, cohesive textures, and stark contrasts are the norm here. Consumer goods also benefit from a minimalist design approach. An iPod can be recognized as an iPod from across any room, as can a pack of Newports as the iconic menthol cigarettes that they are.




Functional or utilitarian minimalism applies more to products, and can used when a consumer good has been designed for one or two specific purposes and does those very well. Examples are when a radio is just a radio, an analog watch just has hands, or a coffee pot just brews coffee. This is a rebellion against the scanner-copier-fax-printer, the alarm clock-radio-CD player-tape deck, and the MP3 player-calendar-internet communication device-cell phone. This is when you want something do to exactly one thing, and do it well without the extras because, let’s face it, most times you don’t need them. The last twenty years has seen our companies design product after product and software package after software package packed with features that we will never even read about in the manual, let alone use.

The opposite of the functional or utilitarian design is spatial minimalism. This again applies to products and is used to describe a product that does as much as can be done in the footprint that it occupies. The more it can do in as little physical space as possible, the better. A dominant product of this school of thought is the personal computer that can function as nearly anything to anyone. Accounting tool, music studio, radio, dictionary, home entertainment system, newspaper, telephone, artistic canvas, and so much more - if you can name it, it can probably do it. Spatially minimal products are great when you want to reduce clutter in your living space or multitask without having to physically move. Some of them utilize a minimalist exterior, preferring to have all of the options appear on a screen rather than through knobs, sliders, and buttons. A really good example of this can be seen in the transition from film cameras to digital ones. Settings and options that were once assigned to a few buttons and winders are now available to be scrolled though in a screen. This makes the camera more powerful, but also more complicated to use.

Like I said earlier, these styles of minimalism can overlap. My MacBook is a good example of aesthetic spatial minimalism, while a product like Samsung’s ML1630 laser printer is an example of aesthetic functional minimalism. I’m sure you can find plenty of your own examples as well.





The keys to fully subscribing to minimalism are factoring in price to your purchasing decisions, and disregarding the corporate mandate that New is always Better. While aesthetic minimalism transcends time, functional minimalism is sometimes most evident in older products. Spatial minimalism spans a wide expanse of products and a variety of industries and is fast becoming the norm for consumer electronics.

Important for the aspiring minimalist to realize is that sometimes sacrifice is in order to preserve a uniformly minimal style. Often this means leaving features out of things that you buy. Opting for less powerful but more streamlined and aesthetically beautiful objects bring you back to thinking about why you really needed extra features in the first place. Whether it is a lamp with no ornamentation, a toaster that is brushed metal instead of white plastic, or a car with beautiful lines, these functional items may cost more, but have the added benefit of being something that you enjoy looking at.


And that in itself is beautiful.




_DZ

Making The Most of Experiences Both On & Off-Line

On 2/28/09, the Baby Blues syndicated newspaper comic depicted a scene of a man and his young daughter in an ice cream shop.

“I want two scoops with gummy worms, Oreo pieces, M&Ms, chocolate sauce, and sprinkles,” the girl requested.

“But what flavor of ice cream do you want?” asked her dad.

“Does it matter?” replied his daughter.

Does it matter, indeed.

The practice of adding more and more extras until the original item, the fundamental part of the experience, is irrelevant. Does it matter, indeed!

Comics are meant to mirror real life, aren’t they? They’re a great way of bringing out the idiosyncrasies of society; an effective medium for revealing the underlying behaviors that we all practice. So in what other areas besides ice cream selection do we do this? What other experiences do we dilute with extras until the original activity loses its significance?

The first one that came to mind is relationships. In a youth culture in which individuals like to relate to one another through bits of trivia and meaningless connectivity, it becomes easier and easier to objectify people and sort them by their characteristics, their likes and dislikes, and their perceived personality. Someone’s actual character, a thing distinctly separate from personality, becomes pushed further and further into the background. When this happens, finding a potential spouse becomes as easy as making a checklist of attributes, and once you meet someone who fulfills all of them, marriage is not far behind. You don’t want a real relationship with someone who shares your values, beliefs and personal convictions; rather you desire someone who “you can laugh with, someone who appreciates music, the arts, and who is just as at comfortable with a slow night at home as going out and hitting the city night scene.” You’re looking for the extras, the add-ons, to make the experience worthwhile.

Other times, it’s the extras that make the activity even tolerable at all. Would you buy a car with no CD player or cruise control? What about power, heated, leather seats, an iPod hookup, or a video entertainment system?

Because a car doesn’t need any of those things.

But, unless you’re going really really fast, driving is an inherently boring activity. It’s monotonous, not particularly mentally or physically stimulating, and sometimes very nerve-wracking. For many people, driving without being entertained would be interminable. Hence we now have all of these options available on our cars that help us relax and be more comfortable and entertained. This is also, I think, a big part of why we like to talk on the phone and drive.

I’m sure there are more examples of this, but for now we’ll just leave it at driving. The point is that inherently boring activities lightened by extras make them bearable.

Obvious questions arise here. Firstly, we know that this happens - so is it a good thing or a bad thing? If driving is seen as a necessary evil, are things that make it more tolerable acceptable even if they detract from the experience? Most would say yes. Some would even argue that in the case of driving, the add-ons make the experience what it is - i.e. driving IS listening to music. What about in relationships? Is it too much of a stretch to say that the US divorce rate is at 50% because we rush into relationships based on how well our checklist matches the people we meet? This is slightly problematic at best and pathological at worst. And what could this trend hold for he future of society as more and more of it moves online?

The practice of adding extras to enhance boring activities is almost a given in the current state of online universes such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, where something as basic as existing is already boring. Online life, i.e. being a digital avatar in an online world, is without the element of outside forces and randomness that is a innate part of our earthly universe. Things don’t “just happen” to you when you’re in an online world. (And when they do, as in the case of "random battles," they quickly get annoying and we wish them gone.)

Consequently, any enjoyment that you derive from being in an online world is a direct result of the experiences that you initiate. What you get out of acting in an online world is a direct result of what actions you undertake and, accordingly, you almost always get an expected result. You reap exactly what you sow. This set up allows for very little experience to have value, if value is defined as getting more out of something than what you put into it. (For example, if you buy a computer from a liquidating electronics giant for half of its original price, that is a good value - you received a computer that is worth more than you paid for it.)

If you ask people what they most value about life, I think you will find that most people will talk about the little things in life. Things like watching a sunset, staring at the stars, feeling a warm breeze, walking through crunching leaves, getting a hug, or eating a juicy bunch of grapes. A lot of these things are not affected whatsoever by human actions. Some of them are, yes, but a lot of the great things about nature are things that we cannot control. Since we reap the benefits but invest nothing, these are valuable experiences. And maybe more importantly, these actions are unquantifiable.

There are very, very few of these experiences in a controlled online universe as it exists now. Random nice things seldom happen to you, and you must search long and hard to find anything of true value. As more and more interactions take to the online world, and if the digital frontier is the future of human society (and it is) then this problem of lack of intrinsic value will have to be fixed. We will have to find ways to make simply existing in the online realm a valuable experience.

So now not only do we have to scrutinize our off-line lives to see how we can put meaning back into experiences but we have to figure out how to do so in the online world as well. What seems to be a learned behavior off-line is a fundamental part of the online experience. Either we as a society find a way to fix it in both realms or we learn to live with it and thrive off of it - an option that I think is less than ideal. Either way a lot of change is in order, and the sooner we get to work on it the better.





_DZ