This cartoon is an updated look at my original Facebook dogs, who kicked off Noise to Signal as the first cartoon under that name. And they are, of course, a reference/homage to Peter Steiner‘s iconic New Yorker cartoon. (more)About Noise To Signal:
Noise to Signal is Rob Cottingham‘s take on the social web, online living and all that goes with it. N2S (as it’s known affectionately to, well, me) has appeared on such sites as the Huffington Post, PC World and TreeHugger. (more)
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Previously on Skandalon : Stéphane Massa-Bidal. Follow him on Tumblr.
The quote he’s using in this illustration is attributed to Tammy Faye Bakker. She’s also purportedly said “I wake up every morning and I wish I were dead, and so does Jim”. Cheaper and maybe less effective, I would say. I’ll come back to it.
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 | Told you so, everyone who has tried to convince me that our elevators’ door-close buttons did anything |
Arment, as do so many others, really wants to believe that the door-close button does nothing in an elevator. There are stories going around about this: door-close buttons aren’t really working in elevators, they are just there so you can feel like you’re in control. For his article, Paumgarten may have got some information about this from Otis representative:
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. (more)
But there’s no specific references in his article : who did confirm this to him? Is it true about all elevators? All brands? Everywhere? Can an elevator be configured one way while another elevator, identical in brand and model, be configured another way? There’s no hard fact about this in the article. Nothing to prove that all door-close buttons are fake. And nothing to disprove it.
And that’s why Arment reaction is so interesting. He doesn’t know for a fact if the door-close button work or not in a given elevator. But he wants to feel in control : he doesn’t want to be controlled by an elevator’s fake button (eh, come on, nobody’s that stupid : we’re not monkeys, right?). So he will likely dismissed any piece of information telling him the very opposite of what he wants to believe. Just like those who believe in the door-close button will dismiss any delay in the closing of the door as being a sign that they did not controlled its action. Arment, though, will be very interested in information (Paumgarten’s article for example) that reinforce his belief. Just like the door-close button believers will consider any closing door as being an empirical proof of the control they can have on the elevator.
And thus, those who think the door-close button is just a fake are not smarter than those who think the door-close button works. It’s just two different ways to cope with a lack of adequate information, a certain degree of uncertainty : without hard facts about this issue, we’re all but believers trying to stay in control in front of an ambiguous situation.
[Update : July 17th, 2010] The same argument goes for Slavoj Zizek:
Zizek loves to correct viewpoints when precisely the opposite is considered correct. He calls this counterintuitive observation. His favorite thought form is the paradox. Using his psychoanalytical skills, he attempts to demonstrate how liberal democracy manipulates people. One of his famous everyday observations on this subject relates to the buttons used to close the door in elevators. He has discovered that they are placebos. The doors don’t close a second faster when one presses the button, but they don’t have to. It’s sufficient that the person pressing the button has the illusion that he is able to influence something. The political illusion machine that calls itself Western democracy functions in exactly the same way, says Zizek. (Spiegel Online: “Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show” by Philipp Oehmke, July 8th, 2010)
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| The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end. |
Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?
Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.
Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo
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| Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That’s the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit. |
Interesting thoughts about the future of the computer ecosystem.
Charlie Ross
“writes fiction full-time, has sold around 16 novels, has won one Hugo award and been nominated nearly a dozen times, and has been translated into about a dozen languages.” (much more)
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| Et c’est ainsi qu’à la fin du XXe siècle, au début de ce XXIe siècle, il arrive assez souvent que l’on entende des philosophes dire, soit avec un air presque effarouché, soit avec une espèce d’autosatisfaction, avec une jouissance très semblable à celle du M. Homais de Madame Bovary : “Moi, la technique, je n’y ai jamais rien compris”, ce qui veut toujours dire aussi : “Et je ne ferai jamais rien pour y comprendre quelque chose.” “J’ai un ordinateur et un téléphone portable, et je ne comprends absolument pas comment ça marche” : on entend souvent dire cela avec une espèce de contentement de soi complètement idiot et assez misérable ― comme si le fait de ne pas comprendre comment un système technique fonctionne était quelque chose dont on pouvait se vanter. |
Previously on Skandalon : Bernard Stiegler
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| Disconnection is the new counterculture. |
Aside from being an obvious overstatement, and from ignoring what happened to the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s (it has been recycled by the mainstream culture) it’s funny to see this idea blogged and reblogged about. Let’s not forget, in the enthusiasm one can have to find or to point a way out, that connectivity is not only about the Internet, that one cannot be “disconnected” simply by turning off a computer or a TV.
Nicholas Carr made this comment regarding James Sturms’ decision to stop using his computer and quit the web. James Sturms is a cartoonist : he tells the whole story over at Slate magazine.
About Nicholas Carr:
“Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor.” (more)
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Statement:
“This site is my effort to introduce my work into the personal space described here by John Berger. Of course, the nature of this space has changed since 1972. Instead of a board, the Internet has become the environment in which we gather media.
My desire for my work is for it to be accessible to any audience that it might interest, and it is the purpose of this website to make that possible. So please feel free to download any images or videos, send them to your friends or link to them on your social networking profiles. All I ask in return is credit and a link back to this site.”
And here’s John Berger’s quote Clendenen is referring to:
“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.” (ways of seeing, 1972)
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Dilbert by Scott Adams, Feb. 11, 1996
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