Iterations

Another bit about “modern society” that people bemoan is our mobility.  Sometimes our excessive moving about is blamed on job and career, but more often than not, its just on the list of self-evident reasons for complaint.  Like the weather.

The more I pay attention to the human past, however, I find this received wisdom puzzling.  Indeed, I would argue that our ability to move is what keeps us from falling back into serfdom.  If the job sucks too much, we can always move.    If there’s a better than good job, we can move for that, too.

Oh, I understand that moving is a pain.  Especially, if you are poor.  But it’s neither against the law nor required by law.  (At least in this country, or in most of Europe.)  Oh, we have passports and immigration rules (sort of), but most of those are restrictions on entry into a place, not restrictions on exit.

And it is the exit possibilities that really make for a non-serf world.

All that said, I’ve always considered myself more an exception to the rule rather than its illustration.  I’ve spent most of my life in two states (Wisconsin and Iowa), and with the exception of one semester in London when in college and a couple other extended research-based visits to England, I’ve never lived farther South than St. Louis or more than 125 miles away from the Mississippi River.

But I decided to count the numbers of homes I’ve lived in over the years.  And the number — 16 — shocked me.

Because this number isn’t particularly padded.  To be sure, I did count multiple places in the same town some.  But I only counted places where I have lived for at least two months.  And even there I didn’t count as separate each return to the town of my birth unless it was to a physical location (once because my mother had moved, the other because I was practicing law and wanted to live in a house rather than a duplex apartment).

But even if you count only the number of different towns or cities, even my number of discrete homes — seven — would have been amazing to  a feudal serf would have considered substantial.

That serf would have likely had at most two different homes in his lifetime — the one he was born in, and the one he lived in after being married. (Many times in fact, the places would have been one and the same.)

From 2 to 7 is an increase in mobility of 350 percent.  From 2 to 16 is an increase of 800 percent.

And I guarantee that I’m far down in the lower tail of the distribution, even among those who have lived most of their lives as I have in “rural America.”

That, I submit, is evidence a fortiori of our escape from serfdom.

And it is a greater protection against tyranny and poverty than industrialization and the Internet combined.  Far more than any revolution, and far, far more than any “political” protection.  More even than modern plumbing.

We can move.

I may be able to choose serfdom.  Sometimes I think a lot of my fellow citizens are willing to do just that.

But you can’t make me choose it.

Nanner, nanner, nanner.

There are two kinds of bullies.

The kind who control the way you play a particular game.   And the kind who insist you play their game.

Most Americans reject the first kind (save for those who like to be BMOP (big man on playground).

But, if truth be told, the first kind is pretty easy to get away with.  You can just walk away.  Life isn’t grade school.  If I think Joe is a bully, I just decide to hang out where Joe isn’t.

It’s the second kind of bully that can be the problem.  The second kind of bully wants to keep you on his playground, playing his way by his rules.

And, unfortunately, our “system” encourages such bullies to get together and seek power.  They know that it’s a lot easier to keep on bullying if you’ve got a gang of bullies who stand with you.

Economics says that a cartel contains the seeds of its own destruction.  That cartel members have an incentive to cheat, since they can reap extra economic benefits from doing so.  But bullies aren’t driven by economic incentives.  They’re driven by the pursuit of power.

That’s why a Constitution of enumerated powers combined with a t Bill of Rights was such a critical thing. The founders knew their would be bullies out there.   Bullies who would see majoritarianism as a tool.

Unfortunately, “we the people” have emasculated both Constitution and Bill of Rights by converting them into a tool of utilitarianism.  And in so doing, we’ve enabled bullying on a huge scale.  Indeed, we’ve converted the greatest innovation in government ever into an unprecedented affirmation of the bullying ethos.  If we don’t like what other people want to do, the solution has become to pass a law to make what they want to do illegal.

We’ve professionalized and legitimated bullying.  Look at your typical Congressperson, your typical President, your typical bureaucrat.  They’re almost all bullies.

They’re just bullies that look good and promise better.   All at the expense of the evil on the other side of them and us.  We don’t want our bullies to be jackbooted thugs.  We want them to be expertly coiffed with business suit and nicely shined shoes.

Why is political correctness such an evil?  Because  it is nothing more than another excuse for type 2 bullying.  To convert taking offense into taking over the schoolyard.

Do I consider some speech offensive?  Sure.  Absolutely.

And as an adult, I have a pretty easy solution available to me:  I can walk away.

But political correctness doesn’t work that way.  If the PC bullies are offended, they’re solution isn’t walking away and associating elsewhere.  They’re solution is that of serfdom.   They want to build a 10,000-volt fence around the schoolyard, and then, when the offending person can’t escape, pummel him unmercifully until he speaks better.

Look at today’s newspapers.  Look at the stories and editorials where people are calling for government action.  Look carefully at what people are asking for.   Are they asking for enforcement of the Constitution and its protection.   Or are they asking for help in bullying other people?

If you have to, start with those whose causes you don’t share.  (It’s always easier to see bullying on the other side.)  But after you’ve identified the opponents’ bullying tactics, move to those who you agree with.  Look in the mirror.  Look real carefully at what is being proposed with respect to the choices of your opponents.   I hate to say this, but more often than not, you’re seeking to take advantage of the same bullying tactics and threats.

This isn’t meant as America bashing.  Bullying using state power has been the default of political action since long before our republic was founded.   Indeed, what made the American Experiment so special is that it attempted to formulate rules that prevented legitimized bullying and that discouraged just the sort of bullying we now practice.

It’s just that we no longer hear the voices of the Founders well enough.   We’re too busy trying to be bullies.

People talk of craft these days, if they talk about it at all, to bemoan its absence.  We complain about the lack of craftsmanship in what we buy, and we complain about how the modern world of mass production has replaced a world of artisans and craftsmen.

But, as is the case of so many of our complaints, we rarely look in the mirror.

How many of us, really, have spent our lives in the pursuit of a craft?  Be honest.

Most of us haven’t.  We’ve been too busy focusing on our jobs and being producers and consumers.  We haven’t had time to be interested in the pursuit of a “craft.”

Aside:  I’ve used italics here because I’m not just talking about “traditional” crafts  like cabinetmaking or basket-making or blacksmithing.  I’m not talking out of some nostalgic pastoralism.  I’d much rather live in today’s world than some pre-industrial world, because in today’s world I”m much more likely to be able to enjoy the fruits of other’s craftsmanship.

No, I’m speaking of the attitude of the craftsman toward his craft.

The true craftsman cares about craft for its own sake, not because its a job or production requirement.    The true craftsman goes beyond what others ask for.  He explores deeper.  He develops skills and ways of seeing that ordinary producers or consumers employers or employees never even contemplate a need for.  He does so, not because someone has asked these things of him, but because the craft, and his personal character, demand attention to them.

When I think of craft, I always think of my late father.  I did not appreciate it while he was alive, but as I’ve aged I’ve increasingly realized just how unusual he was. (I was, alas, only 18 when he died, firmly in the grip of the sophomoric adolescence that would still control me for a couple more decades.)

Dad was a master plumber, but he never made a lot of money.  He could have — even in those days, master plumbers could make a pretty penny if they desired.  I had more than my older sister and brother did, but even I wore hand-me down clothes until I was nearly in high school.

My dad moved to a different beat.

I never realized just how good Dad was as a plumber until I owned my own house and started hiring plumbers for repairs and re-modelling projects.  Until I realized that even most people who the state certifies as “masters” weren’t in his league.

I’m not complaining of the work these other plumbers did for me — it has generally been just fine at getting the hot water to my shower and the feces safely to the sewer.

But Dad, his understanding of plumbing took him beyond the mundane  into the realm of art.  He could solder a fitting without just a fine uniform line of solder showing:  no globs, no drips, no errors.  (This was back when all plumbers used copper for hot/cold water service.)  And he’d do so whether he was soldering uphill or cramped like a pretzel in a crawl space.

Nothing was wasted.

Take a look at the pipe in your basement sometime.  If it’s like most houses, new or old, done by professionals or DYI, you’ll find a a number of excess fittings used as the plumber dealt with joists, walls, wiring, or the efforts of previous plumbers.   Try tracing the lines to and from each fixture:  it can be like trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti.

Look at how many 90-degree ells are used.  Ask yourself whether any of the lines might have been better suited to the use of 45-degree fittings.  Traveling the hypotenuse of a triangle by definition uses less pipe than traveling through the other two sides.  However, as anyone who has struggled to remember and apply the Pythagorean theorem knows, its also harder to measure the distance.

I’m not a plumber.  I can fix a toilet or replace a faucet.  But running pipe — frankly I think something as important to your health as plumbing (and it’s far more important than most of the stuff the health care “debate” focuses on) should be left to the professionals.  When I think of the complexity of what they do, frankly I’m amazed.  I wouldn’t have a clue.

But when I think of Dad’s plumbing, I’m not just amazed.  I’m awed.

I guarantee that if you asked him and just about any other plumber of his time to plumb identical new houses in a subdivision, he’d do it with less materials than the other plumber.  And if you looked carefully at the result, his arrangement of pipes would make more sense to you and the system would perform better.

(Not only can you save some pipe by using 45′s instead of 90′s, it can greatly improve the water flow and mean less clogging, freezing, etc.)

But the real craftsmanship of what he did would come down the line, when the owner of the house wants to remodel or build on or replace the bathtub with a jacuzzi.  When you realize that he didn’t just build “to last”, he built “to modify easily” at the same time.

But really, that’s just his output as a craftsman.  What really matters is how he got there.

He got there because he was driven by plumbing, how and why it works.  He was like Scotty on the original Star Trek — he read tech manuals in his spare time.  He didn’t just go to hardware/plumbing supply shows (he also ran a hardware business) to find new products to sell, he went to listen to what the other tech types were saying about new materials, techniques, and tools.  He listened not just to what a new tool would do, but the reasoning behind the development of the tool.  He had a curiosity about everything that might remotely affect plumbing.   Less than a year before his death at the age of 57, he completed a design course that required him to travel 35 miles each way to attend class.  And, were he still alive, I expect he would still be extending his craft.

Not because he needed to keep up with his discipline.  He was far enough beyond the usual plumber that the only “continuing education” he would have needed was to keep track of the idiocies non-plumbing bureaucrats keep thinking up.

No, that’s not why he did it.  He did it because, for him, plumbing was important in its own right.

Why did he value plumbing so much?   I don’t know.  That’s one of the things I never thought to ask him until long after he was gone.  And, to be honest, when I was a kid, I would much rather he would have spent less time on it.  But whatever the reason, whether it was what he should have valued or not, that was what he was.

And that attitude is what made him not just a plumber, but a craftsman.

Personally, I think the world would be better off if more people took my dad’s approach to life.  But if they don’t, the problem isn’t in “the system” or “the economy.”

The problem is in the mirror.

I just realized it has been over a year since my last post.  Unacceptable.

I shan’t go into all the details.  It’ll just get me in whine mode, and I’d rather save that mode for things that are important, namely rants about politicians, the current education system, and other iterative topics of this blog.

I will make one observation for those of you wondering where the economy is going.  (I don’t know why people ask me the “what do you think about the economy?” question all the time.  After all, I teach economics.  That’s not the same as knowing where the economy is going.  If anything, I expect the two are negatively correlated variables.)  But for those of you who insist on asking, here’s a bit of an economic observation:  if I had spare money to invest  right now, I’m pretty sure I’d put a serious chunk of it into “health care for senior citizens”.  Having dealt with the ups and downs of being a caregiver for an elderly parent, I’ve got to see a bit of what the youngsters out there are going to deal as the Baby Boom generation (i.e. mine) ages.  Forget about worrying about your 401(k), Gen Yers.  Think about how you’re going to deal with all us old farts when we pass 75.

There is going to be one crapload of a lot of old people out there.  And our generation, unlike my mother’s generation, has defined “low savings rate”.  Add in the fact that ours is the first generation of entitlement, and you’re going to have a nightmare.

Weep, Gen Y.  You’re going to have to deal with our incontinence, our congestive heart disease, our Type II diabetes, and all the rest.  For years, because we’re going to be living at least as long as our parents, and our parents were a fecund lot.

And no, the government can’t solve this one for you.  Sorry.  I hate to tell you this, but they’ve been clueless for decades.

Your generation cares a lot about sustainabilty.  Well, guess what, you are going to have to figure out how to sustain, not what this economy is doing right now….you’re going to have to figure out how to sustain unprecedented economic growth.  You’re going to have to reinvent the economic world the way the Europeans re-invented it a couple hundred years ago.

You’ve made a good start.

But the solution to dealing with us old farts is going to be tough.  I don’t care what the worriers and entitlement-people and the politicos who think all solutions are found in someone else’s pocket say.  You’ve got one “social task” ahead of you:  you need  to figure out not just “sustainable” growth.  You need to figure out how to grow growth itself.

We’ll help, of course.  But pretty soon we’re going to be old enough to demand you service our retirement “needs.”

Good luck.

Academics love to talk about excellence.  You can bet that as terms start all over the country in the next month, convocations and lecture halls are going to be full of people proclaiming its importance and its connection to the education tasks being embarked upon.

Yet even if we agree to the silly distinction that used to be made between “liberal arts” and “vulgar arts,” and look at just the liberal arts, that which one would think would be the province of academics, even if we look at the century (the 20th) where American higher education reached its pinnacle, what do we find?

The greatest American poet of the twentieth century was an insurance man.*
The second greatest American poet of the twentieth century was a family physician**.
As to poetry coming out of the academy? Sell, can one say obscure, pedantic, self-absorbed?  Even, ahem, boring as hell?

And the greatest 21st century American philosopher?   He was a longshoreman***.

The smartest, most creative person I’ve ever known was a plumber who never went to college****.

Four is too small a sample to generalize upon.  But you’ have to admit, they’re three examples to get you wondering.  If higher education is not the place where the best of the best are to be found, should it be the place that we look to when we seek to credential “excellence”?

_________________________

*Wallace Stevens
**William Carlos Williams
***Eric Hoffer
****My dad

Regular readers know that when it comes to “the effects of the internet”, I tend to be an optimist.  Even an apologist.

I have to be honest, though.  My position is to a large extent, one of faith rather than one based on “conclusive scientific evidence”.  No, not the capital-F faith that my July 18 post was all about, but small-f faith.  The “I believe this, well, just because” sort of  faith.

Oh, my reasons are a little better, a little more sophisticated than that.  (At least *I* think so.)  But compared to, say, what is collectively known about the economic effects of the American railroad, or the size of GDP in 1970, our overall empirical sophistication about “the effects of the internet” is amazingly low right now.

Not just mine, but thine and all the Nobel laureates, too. (And we won’t bother mentioning how little clue the Nancy Pelosi/CNN/New York Times crew have.)

And its not for lack of babbling on the question.  Consider the subquestion of: “what is the internet doing to the quality of social relationships?”

Quite frankly, we’re barely getting to the point where we’re even asking the right questions.

On one key empirical point, virtually all the pro-internets and virtually all the con-internets agree:  the network of social relationships looks very, very different today.

But, despite all the “debate,” most discussing this empirical reality fail to engage the real question:  is this good, or bad, and why?  Because virtually no one explains why web-of-relationships-A is categorically “better” or “worse” than web-of-relationships-B.    Worriers point to the decline of traditional connectivity (churchgoing, newspaper reading, political participation)(“A” was better!), while pro-internet people (raising hand) point to all the marvelous-ness of LinkedIn and blogs and Twitter.

But do we ever really engage the question of “what makes A (or B) better?”  I’m not convinced.

Two examples:
1.  Two “differences” you’ll observe if you live any length of time in a small town, one positive and one negative.  Positive: you can leave your car unlocked with less risk.  Negative:  more people will mind your business.  So which is more significant?

2.  Google “twitter whore youtube”.  You’ll find a two part video by one LisaNova.  Watch it.  Are you appalled or do you find it amusing?

With the exception of interludes in London, St. Louis, and Iowa City, and various bits of business travel, I’ve spent all my life in towns and “cities” of under 10,000 souls.  And I can tell you that I haven’t answered #1 satisfactorily yet.

And as for #2?  Well, I have no clue.  I found the video originally because I was searching for what people were saying about twitter;  and then I spent another half an afternoon trying to figure out a subset of the splinter cultures that use/live on YouTube.  (After a bit of searching on LisaNova, I discovered one such splinter culture, populated, at least temporarily, by people blogging as  CommunityChannel, Channel Reviews,  Danny Diamond.  What does it mean that the total views of part 1 of LN’s “twitter whore” parody are approaching 1.5 million, or that her 2007 “last blog ever” (which isn’t parody at all) now has 648,000 views?

Clearly, there is no mainstream anymore. We live in an urban world — with tens of thousands of small town communities out there on the web.  Is this bad, maybe Tower of Babel bad? Or is it good?  Tocqueville’s America of associations writ large?

I don’t know.

It’s definitely a different world.  But “better or worse”?  Well, er, um, it is better.

I think.

Why?

Well, just because.

Sometimes life is just surreal.

My current iPod playlist seques from “Amazing Grace” (Paul Schwartz, State of Grace) to “Push” (Prince, Diamonds and Pearls CD).  Bizarre.  Whyever did I set it up that way?

No clue.

I wish I had more time to spend on marketing research.  I keep thinking of things that need measuring but never seem to find the time to develop the metrics.

Take the term I use in the title of this post:  “time to cliché”.   It may be a WOT (in both “Wade original term” and “wot?????” senses), but I’ll leave to those less lazy than I the task of  searching for prior use.

I get an awful lot of email that isn’t technically spam, but might as well be for all the likelihood of my opening the messages.  (For me, the technical definition of spam is something like “unsolicited, without offering double-opt out, etc.”)  It might as well be spam because the subject line tries to pull via cliche.  Using phrases like:

?    ”free web summit”
?    ”"double your …”
?    ”the secrets to …”
?    ”official notice”
?    ”save up to…”
?    ”how to … Now!”
?    ”you’re invited…”
?    ”only XX hours left”
?    ”I don’t usually do this, but …”
?    ”I blew it…”

And the same is true for the teaser copy on the snail mail solicitations…
?    ”urgent update”
?    ”final
?    ”official correspondence”

And so on.

Now, I understand that these cliches are used because they worked in the past.  And, direct response being what it is in the Internet age, abandoned when they don’t pull enough.  That I’m still getting all of the above means they probably are still working to some extent.

But it’s amazing how quick they become tired and unproductive.  Take the first one.  I’ve been offered more web summits than there are peaks in the Rockies, Himalayas, and Andes combined.  “double” and “secrets” and all the others — instant trashing.

And it happens faster and faster all the time.

And I don’t think its just me finally developing better bullshit filters.  I’m still pretty gullible, after all.  But I think individual pieces of language are getting worn out faster and faster.  Scroll down your inbox (if that’s where you keep your clutter), or though your email trash before you hit “empty” — look at all the phrases that bring forth that delete key in your mind….and think about how recently it was that the same subject line phrase would have pulled you into opening the email.

For years I’ve taught about the dangers of cliché in writing.   But a hidden assumption of that teaching was that it takes awhile for something to become a cliche, a while during which the word or phrase has social or economic value.  How should one approach the use of cliche when the half-life of meaning begins to resemble that of a transuranic element.

I don’t think the answer is obvious anymore.

I’ve remarked briefly before about my changing business model for Iterative Listening. Part of the story lies in my realization that, for lots of reasons, I wasn’t interested in having “direct mail/emaill copywriting (business-to-consumer)” at the center, as it was in the original plan.  One reason:   I’m just not convinced that the “tried and true” of direct response will work with the various Gen Y-related demographics I’m most interested in..

It isn’t that Gen Y won’t respond to some direct mail/email solicitation.  They have, they do, and they will continue to.

But their information filters work very, very different than older direct response demographics, and that makes some of the DR marketer’s traditional techniques highly problematic.

Think of it this way:  any given marketing activity can engender three types of “response”:  (i) positive response (leads, sales, other conversion goals); (ii) non-response (the most frequent, call it “send it to the trash” response; and (iii) negative response.  This last is the most dangerous, and the kind that an awful lot of direct mailers simply seem to ignore.

I call it the “pissed-off percentage”.  People in group (iii) don’t just trash your letter or email.  They remember.  They take umbrage at your wasting their time.  They remember, and they spread the word.  And the word is not good.

As long as the positive response is “big enough,” traditional direct mailers have always been happy.  (And so are those who write copy for them, by the way, since copywriter fees/royalties are directly a function of the copywriters ability to “pull”.)

And it’s worked.  I can point to dozens of copywriters whose own financial success (and their clients’ financial success) is directly related to their ability to pull.  Focus on making group (i) as big as possible.  Period.

Look closely at the demographics.  These successful writers get their  greatest successes with whom?   How often are they aiming at Gen Y?  Or even Gen X?  How many of them are focusing on Boomers.  Seniors?  Super-seniors?

Or they’re writing B-to-B copy.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that B-to-B copy looks different than B-to-C copy, and pretty much always has.  Business buyers — well, they just don’t have the time or the patience to deal with those things that work in many B-to-C markets:  constant upselling, daily autoresponders, telemarketing.  And their “piss off factor” is very high.

And Gen Y is the same way.

Take up-selling.  Nothing wrong with it.  Gotta do it.  But do it “too much,” and the recipient stops reading you completely.  They see the envelope from the Upselling Institute, and it goes immediately to the trash.  They see UI is the sender, and one click removes the message from the inbox.

And if they keep seeing UI, and you make them scroll down to the unsubscribe button — well, they don’t see that as “easy”.  They see that as someone wasting their multi-tasking time.  And they’ve joined the pissed-off percentage.

And guess what?  A lot of those Gen Yers on your mailing list?  The ones who haven’t unsubscribed yet?   You might think they’re still warm or semi-warm prospects.  But they are colder than cold.  They’re as cold as a bath of liquid nitrogen.

They’re illustrations of the Klingon/Sicilian proverb about revenge.

Okay, perhaps that’s stretching the point — since most of them simply aren’t going to be bothered to waste any more time with you.

But they are going to talk about you.  Because they don’t like being “just a customer.”

By the time you identify how to transplant your upselling strategy and “discover” a new marketing channel like Facebook or Twitter, they’re already living their real internet lives somewhere else.  Somewhere else where they’re spreading negative vibes about you.

You’ve violated the authenticity principle.  You’ve entered the realm where the best that you can hope for is that they ignore you.  And the worst — they spread the word about how your only interest is your revenue stream.  They don’t mind you wanting to be rich.  But they do mind you only wanting them for their money.

Whether they should have such a view of the marketplace is beside the point.  The fact is, they have it.  And they live it.

They’re not into “doing business” (at least not when they’re behaving as prospective buyers).  They’re into relationships.  And they’re not interested in relationships with people who see them only as prospects.

It’s basic marketing, really.  Learn the psychology of your market first.  Then choose from your box of tools.  Not the other way around.

That hasn’t changed.

What has changed are the consequences if you don’t do it.

These prospects have choices beyond “yes” and “no.”

And they know it.

A few days ago I posted for the first time on the blog of perhaps my favorite science fiction writer, L. E. Modesitt, Jr.  (It’s either him or C. J. Cherryh, I go back and forth.)  Mr. Modesitt had posted about an Economist study about the effects of the Internet on social relationships, and the thread got my Gen-Y-apologist knee jerking.

I started by pontificating, “First, not reading tripe (i.e. most newspapers) could be evidence of sanity on the part of the populace rather than the opposite. Even could I abolish sleep, I only have 168 hours a week to work with; whyever should I spend it on what passes for newspaper reporting today?”  And then went into a way-too-extended discussion of Tocqueville on American associationalism.

But it got me thinking about the reading of newspapers.  (Modesitt is a favorite author because he always makes me think!)  After all, despite my comment about “tripe”, I do subscribe to a daily newspaper.  So why do I subscribe?  What do I read?

Today’s Gazette — formerly known as the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the paper now bills itself as “An Independent Newspaper in Iowa’s Technology Corridor” — is in three sections.

Section A — state news mostly, plus editorials, weather and obits.  The section takes just seconds to scan.  I read about four paragraphs about our idiot governor’s idea to run a passenger train from Iowa City to Chicago — a train that would travel at a leisurely 79mph and take 5 hours (assuming Amtrak went against its usual practice and ran on time).  Obits — well, I’m getting old enough that i check these periodically, a tiny bit of evidence that social relationships still matter. Glance at weather — more thunderstorms.  Lovely: my neighbors and I have been helping each other out all weekend after Friday brought not one, but two, hailstorms with quarter-sized hail.  (Actually baseball-sized a few miles southeast of here.  Yech.)  The rest of the section — scanned headlines and done in under a minute.

Section B — sports, national/world news.  When younger I would have spent some time on sports pages — now, the only thing I notice is that last weekend was the British Senior Open and that I’d never heard of the golfer who won it.  The national/world news — under a minute, and that was a waste of time.

Section C:  “Accent”, comics, classifieds.  Haven’t read comics in years.  Classifieds I rarely look at, but I looked at them today — looks like a pretty healthy section, actually — lots of social interaction there.  Though I suppose it doesn’t count since its the social coordination of markets at their best.  (Craigslist, E-bay — all they do is drive us apart, say many know-everything critics.)

And “Accent”.  Well, I suppose it used to be called “human interest” or some such.   Most of the stories today are about health.  One about 72 year-old yoga practitioner.   The rest — basically articles about scientific studies, health risks, what the smarties think us dumbshits should be doing.  Funny thing, isn’t it, the section of the newspaper that one might imagine celebrating social relationships, building them, encouraging them, is doing very little.  There’s a single editorial  about a dad re-uniting with his sons after 3 decades.

Counting writing this blog, I’ve spent about an hour with today’s paper.  I expect that if I had spent an hour randomly surfing the internet I would have seen more, not less, evidence of social relationships being built/developed/strengthened.

How about you, Iterations readers?  How much time do you spend with newspapers?  And what do you spend it on?

Me, tomorrow I expect I’ll be back to “15 minutes or less”.  And to wondering why I keep the subscription.

(p.s. If you want to check out Mr. Modesitt, there’s a link to his website in the blogroll at right. In my opinion, he has a better understanding of economics than just about any science fiction writer out there, even those whom I’m more ideologically simpatico with.)