Cultural Turnover and The New Selfism

I often think about cultural references that I understand but which younger people do not because the presumed concepts have become history.

For example, yesterday I walked past someone wearing a T shirt with a graphic of John Cleese (as Basil Fawlty) saying "Don't mention the war".
To get the joke you not only have to know the show Fawlty Towers, you also have to understand a raft of context for World War II and the post-war issues between Britan and Germany - itself a mixture of nation regimes and people-to-people matters.

Quite a lot for a one-liner. As a cusp Boomer/GenX, I get it but I doubt many Xers would. What sense would a GenY or GenZ make of it? Well, that's partly the point here, not only that they wouldn't but also they just wouldn't bother with anything not targetted at them anyway.

Obviously this kind of cultural turnover is nothing new - our history is full of them. There are a lot in Shakespeare for example. To get all the jokes you need a well annotated and researched version.
Lewis Carroll is another example. I accidentally found out - via Heston's Feasts - that Turtle Soup was such a Victorian fancy that a cheaper seemalike of Mock Turtle Soup was very common. Common enough for Carroll to have a "Mock Turtle" character and never mention "Turtle Soup" at all. I'd misunderstood and thought he had invented the idea of a "mock" creature.

Note that I do want distinguish between a such historical effect and one based on breadth of knowledge. For example having recently read another Jasper Fforde novel, I'm sure there were plenty of references that I didn't get because I haven't read some of the required areas/genres. Here I can safely dismiss generational cues as Fforde is almost the same age as I am.

So much for the kind of cultural turnover that we can expect to observe as time passes and takes with it morsels of information and its tags. What about the idea that there are similar changes to peoples' general attitudes?

This is something that my partner and I have observed as we get around our lives. While we've noticed it in Perth, I'd be surprised if it isn't a general change throughout much of the Western world.

An example of this change would be the concept of taking a photograph. I had to explain to someone recently that most people now take photos of themselves rather than of other things. To this end, most mobile phones that have cameras also have a small convex reflector next to the lens. I advised how this allows the photographer/photographee to see how they will fit in the frame as they snap themselves from in front of the camera. As this issue involves new gadgets and new technology I note that it correlates well to the younger generations. Us oldies are less likely to want or notice such a feature.

Another example however which has clearly crept in and restrospectively been adopted across the generations is the related idea of where the entertainment is. To people who have shifted into the new mode, they ARE the entertainment - and a professionally created and presented show they attend is merely lucky to be there too.

We were recently at a performance of The Fabulous Flag Sisters in Fremantle and the row of people in front of us, while clearly enjoying the show, only had an awareness of, say 50% of it as the rest of time they were busy facing and talking to each other. I didn't mind, they also took time to interact with the show and added to the festive spirit. But it was miles away from my default attitude of being intent on watching in full the artistry I've paid to see.

I suspect that some of this change is based on economics. With an attitude of affluence, the new mode presumes that their pleasure is paramount and performances can be chosen for their convenience. It will be interesting to see if an economic downturn ever creates a reversal of that trend. Ideally of course there will be no downturn.

It is in combining these two shifts that I think we will see a total change in how culture is structured in society.

It may be that satire will be hardest hit as it seems the form most obviously dependent on commonly shared cultural knowledge. It may be no accident that general satirical sketch comedy has disappeared from television. Even in movies satire has become specialised - e.g. horror spoofs for horror fans etc.
There may never be another Monty Python equivalent because our social patterns have no place for one.

The process of referring to something via its conceptual content will be replaced by literal referencing - what Lucy said about Damien's comment on Susan talking about Zack etc - e.g. via a hyperlink on a blog.

In Literature, the oblique reference may also be doomed unless authors are prepared to provide their own footnotes.
The whole presumption of writer vs reader is going in the blender and may never settle back to how it was. There may need to be a smartening up among those who create in old ways, to counter-balance the supposed dumbing-down of the new. Simply presuming that your audience/readers know what you're on about is a luxury whose time has passed.

Performers who thrive on audience response may find that expecting lasting appreciation from consumers of their content is likely to be fraught with disappointment.

To quote Shakespeare, "O brave new world that has such people in it".

Archivandalism

I finally got around to photographing the various buildings around the city where heritage frontages have been handled with total contempt.
What impresses me the most is how the combination of old and new has been done. And in this regard one can only say that there has been a total disregard applied to the heritage structure.
Some go so far as to put a blank wall directly between the old and new - making it very clear that the piece of original building is only left intact by acquiesing to a rule.
Of course I can only guess that the blame lies with the architects. Certainly it is they who have designed the abominations that now stand like Frankenstein creations - half old and half modern with nothing in common.
Instead the issue maybe the project owners who have forced their hands. As a city dweller I don't really care who it is that is at fault.
I presume that in these cases the root cause is a state/city requirement that the original facades be preserved. Oddly enough, that's not a rule that I see a great value in having. It happens that in each case I find the new part of the building to be quite hideous and lacking in external architectural merit, but that's not the issue here.
l'd rather see the old fronts removed to some kind of public space, a kind of facade museum rather than have these bizarre juxtapositions around.
As it stands the mangled result surely satisfies no-one.
It's tempting to interpret the treatments as defiantly waiting for the silly rule to dropped and allow the destruction of the old facade and let the new building stand as proud successors. But this is fantasy - in reality these buildings are too drab and indifferent to support such a passsionate view.
The proof I think is that every single one of these buildings seems to have no actual character of its own. These are anonymously designed by the slavish for the vaccuous.
In truth, almost no-one in Perth cares about any of this. Perth is a city of the suburbs and most people rarely go into the central city anymore. When Perth folk want to see an interesting city, they travel abroad or east, rather than into their own. The way to find character from here is via the airport.
When I started writing this I was going to remark that some hope might be held in the idea that as long as the facades survive there is some chance that the blank boxes behind them will eventually fall and be replaced with something that at least interacts meaningfully.
But now I think that is a lost cause.
I'm sure that in other cities it would be culturally inconceivable to have created so many zombie street fronts, but this is Perth, a mining boom city with no feeling for its own past - and with faceless (probably remote) building creators and sponsors.
Having thought of the Facade Museum concept, I now consider that to be a far better option. Engineering abilities are now such that I'd be surprised if this wasn't both feasible and a minor expense compared to the scale of the new developments.

The paradox of the scales of human experience

From time to time, usually at a point of reflection I am quietly amazed by the extremes of space and time that comprise different people's worlds.
I'm sitting at the Wellington St bus station in central Perth and gazing across the vacant train tracks to the backside of Northbridge (Perth's night district). It is a barren and bleak view, one of many where Perth shows a complete void of aesthetic value. The buildings are all square and blank blocks - not just the backs of the single-story Northbridge cafe block but also buildings that in other cities would be interesting features (the State Library, the new drama centre).
From here, a stranger would have to take it on faith that Northbridge holds bright lights and good times. Indeed, I have just come from there, browsing shops to kill time. And in one of those shops, which has been there for as long as I've lived in Perth, I had a touch of the other sense - a small feature, such as a ventilation grate or a small built in shelf - and could imagine touching it much as I might have 30 years ago while also killing time. Suddenly the wide open sparse cityscape contracts to a long time connection to a repeated moment.
And I think to myself that all cities are full of these anonymous (and let's face it, unimportant) rendezvous points.
I make a lousy tourist I think. I care little for the great vistas and famous landmarks that people travel the world to photograph themselves in front of.
Instead when I travel I find myself wondering about all the little spaces that exist where ever I go. And I wonder which of them have no meaning and which are the home of someone's perspective.
In the same way that a data analyst learns to ignore obvious numbers and seek meaning in the mass of the mundane, so I look for notable ordinary things where ever I go.
When you visit a place it is often hard to know which features are historic and which were only put in place last week.
When my bus goes through the retirement settlements, sometimes the passengers have struggled to reach the bus and struggle to get on board. For them, time and space have contracted to the stage where walking - at all - and making one visit to the shops is a major event. Elsewhere on the planet some guy is preparing to trek solo to the South Pole - a major event that he has planned for years, sold his assets to fund and which his entire life will revolve around. Are these experiences equivalent. I think so. I think all earnest human endeavours that don't harm others are worthy.
It's possible that neither of these people could get through a performance of Tristan und Isolde.
The concept of human achievement is a paradox. How can it be that one person's time wasted is another's great achievement?

More about Piano Grande 15th Nov 2009

My review of Piano Grande!
As usual, the Goverment House Ballroom proved to have superb acoustic for chamber music.
While amplification gets used there - the people speaking at the lecturn had it - it is rarely needed for the performance. The two Fazioli pianos rang clearly for the piano and forte extremes.
Graeme Gilling and Mark Coughlan played a Percy Grainger arrangement of Bach (a Cantata extract). Despite being a familiar Bach tune it seemed more Grainger than Bach, almost expressionist in style.
Then came a Mozart Sonata for 2 pianos played by Yoon Sen Lee and Kathy Chow. I'm not much of a Mozart fan so this mostly just passed by for me. I was impressed by the calm confidence of both performers and Kathy's lightning flick of the arm to turn the pages of her score.
Next was a short piano duet from Poulenc - much lighter than I would expect of him. Played in a sprightly manner by Mark and Lyn Garland. Mark credited Lyn for suggesting the piece and observed that unearthing some rarely played pieces was one benefit of assembling a program to highlight the two Fazioli pianos.
And it was certainly a highlight that followed as Emily Green-Armytage and Adam Pinto explored with gusto Rachmaninov's Suite No 2 (Op.17). In four movements this was by turns energetic and sublime. As ever, part of the audience applauded by mistake after the "intro" movement but by the end of the third ("romance") I would have welcomed a chance to reward such worthy playing. But with no pause Emily and Adam launched into the "tarantelle" which undulated fittingly all the way to its climax. An energised audience gave a well deserved long applause.
During the break, many in the audience went up to get a closer look at the pianos. I don't listen to much piano music so my opinion can't say a lot. I did consider the higher notes to be free of that uncomfortable xylophone pettiness that I normally note in the upper register.
After interval there was a speech from Barry Palmer covering the other purpose of the concert - the 40th birthday for local firm Zenith Music. I used to live in the suburb where they are based and could verify their long history of supporting music teaching. As a left-handed guitarist Zenith was a must-see when I moved to Perth in 1980 and my two neglected acoustic guitars were both bought there.
The second half proper began with four pianists on two pianos for a Smetana Rondo in C major. I remember that I enjoyed it but can now only recall the cosiness of so many hands sharing the keyboards. Little did I know what was yet to come.
Next was the seven year old Shuan Lee playing opposite his father Yoon Sen Lee for a grand sweep through themes from Yellow River Concerto and more. In some ways this was reminiscent of the Grainger/Bach combination earlier on. A fluid mixture of distinctly Chinese phrasings within the swirling familiarity of that most Western instrument - the piano. Watching Shuan Lee bob about was an unexpected bonus but was the only childlike aspect of his performance. One to watch there.
The next item was listed as a Rachmaninov Romance for three performers. I presumed this would be two at one piano and one at the other. Not so! All three were crammed together at one keyboard. Emily in the middle had to play with almost straight arms as Graeme and Lyn were on either side of her. Somehow the piece was coherent and I gave up guessing which player had which lines. I'm glad for their sakes it was a short piece.
For the final piece Bo An Lu came out and reprised his Young Performers Awards feat of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1 with Mark Coughlan tackling the piano reduction of the orchestral sections. A tour de force as you'd expect and a perfect counterpart to the end of the first half. I have to say the piano reduction seemed troublesome in places - I'd not heard it before. Indeed I'm fairly sure that was the first time I've a reduction piano arrangement played opposite a solo piano.
All in all the whole concert was a superb exploration of two grand instruments and you certainly didn't need to be a "piano nut" - as Mark Coughlan put it - to be enthralled by magical works in a wonderful space played by great pianists on truly grande instruments. My thanks to all involved.

Hyper-realism and Continued Judgement by Probability

We're all familiar with judgement by probability. So familiar in fact that many of us don't realise the extent to which it is our default way of making decisons - and - don't ever ask the question of whether using it so often is wise.
So what is it exactly?
An example would be: choosing a restaurant based on how popular it is. Our reasoning is that in the absence of first hand knowledge this is probably a good choice. I doubt that any of us think it likely that a bad restaurant could be popular.
Another example would be choosing a product in the middle price range figuring that is least likely to be overpriced or of poor quality. We are using an assessed probability to make a judgement.
We often hear the advice has that this is what we should do when we don't have expert knowledge ourselves. I think it should surprise us that the same advice is often given as an indicator of expert strategy.
This begs the question of when should anyone not follow this rule? How often is it not the best choice?
Well, in many situations the concept is based on the idea that we, at that time, are the only ones choosing in that way - i.e, that most other people are indicating a value they idependently recognised, presumably from prior experience.
But this isn't always the case. In my city there is a certain restaurant which is busy and successful, yet it only gets bad reviews and everyone who goes swears never to go there again. It succeeds because it has one unmatchable feature and every goes once for that. My city is large enough that one visit per lifetime for all adults is still plenty of trade for the restaurant to work through for years to come.
Another anomaly is profiling, be it for fraud detection or customer potential. Here an analysis is done, say to find the most common income bracket for a product. Once chosen, that group will be further targeted - the rationale being that this gives the best probability for campaigning value.
[Aside: One fairly obvious place where this doesn't work is in a saturated market. There, it might be more productive to chase the customers unlike those you already have. For the purpose of discussion let's presume that the world in which we are choosing is large and our choice is only a small effect.]
Is choosing the most probable really a good strategy?
There are two different types of situation in this regard, which I will label:
- recursive popularity;
- range frequency.
In recursive popularity the problem is that sometimes the only reason some choice is already more popular than the others is .. because it was already more popular than the others. In the early stages there may not have been any compelling reason at all.
Therefore in choosing it now you are really only selecting the one with a lucky history.
With range frequency, the characteristic is something which has a natural range of values. In people an example would be height. [Aside: you might be surprised how often people make selection biased about height.] A classic example of this is using an economic metric - of a business, or a customer - to bias a selection. Imagine any such metric. Most likely it will have something akin to a normal distribution. There can be many reasons why those parts of the population away from the norm are abnormal in other respects too. If we use height to predict clumsiness we might effectively just discover that its easy to find tall clumsy people because they hit their heads on doorways more than short clumsy people. So if our way of detecting clumsiness is to look for forehead bruises then yes we will probably find that preselecting tallish people is more productive than random selection.
[We may also find it better to concentrate on the averagely tall rather than just start from the tallest and work down. This might be because there are not many very tall people and they know well to duck their heads in doorways.]
This idea of selecting away from the norm has been a catchy meme in some quarters, especially as it seems "targeted" yet conveniently selects a suitable number of potentials who are inherently a bit _different_.
The problem here is that reverse thinking is at work. Even if the subset is truly productive the unasked question is where are most of population that we're seeking? I suspect that many of them remain unnoticed amongst the throng nearer the norm.
These issues become even more pertinent where analysis is trying to uncover the results of human guile. The best place to hide a leaf is in the forest - a principle well known to those with something to hide.

Are IT folk really luddites?

While computing generally lends itself to automation I frequently get the feeling that those in charge of IT are not actually keen on it.
Now, by "those in charge" in this context I'm not pointing the finger at IT management (although I'm certaiinly not exempting them either). Rather, my focus is all the people who get their hands dirty with IT day in day out. When was the last time you heard anyone in IT say "ok, I've done what you asked and I've made a button you can push next time you want the same thing"? I'm guessing that by now, most people have NEVER heard that from IT.
Why is that? What went wrong?
I can think of several answers but I don't know which is right.
1. Some amount of control has passed from admin to user which had the dual effect of not giving IT folk a reason to be involved but also to be hired with those skills. To older code warriors this is hard to fathom - what sort of IT person cannot code?
2. Another explanation is the bureaucratisation and outsourcing of IT. If you're providing an IT service may seem not in your interest to let the customer not need you. That seems to play the same for internal as it does for outsourced IT.
What I see as a paradox is that in many ways automation is tantalisingly closer than ever. So many tools are available - much for free - and yet my impression is that the typical user is still as far away from using them as ever.
And do IT folk see it as their role to assist with this? Rarely.
If it weren't for the Web 2.0 revolution then we'd be going globally backwards. Things like Wordpress and Facebook mean there are millions of users getting on with content creation and sharing with almost zero contact with IT folk.
A good measuring stick is a workplace that I know of where there is no use of Web 2.0 and even little of Web 1.0 systems. In that place, general skills in using IT have atrophied and it is quite normal to see people doing repeated "manual" tasks on their computers. There no culture of and little awareness of using automation. It is telling for example that there is no automation of email handling at the client level beyond simple filtering.
Maybe my perspective is warped but it seems to me there is a new divide between the tech-knows and don't-knows. The division is not the old one of programmers versus non-programmers. Instead the split is between those that know things can always be better and those who only use whatever they've been shown how to use (and could follow).
It used to be that most people I knew in IT were actively interested in shifting from one group to the other. Now though, I'd say most IT people prefer users to stay dumb. They even inhibit the awareness and use of automation tools. They are thus the new luddites - breaking the machines lest they come into full operation.
From things I have seen this problem has become difficult to work around. Imagine you are a small business that needs an IT setup. Who can you find who will act in your interest rather than theirs? The ideal IT job makes itself obsolete and leaves the customer with little extra need for service. I'm not saying that there are no businesses out there doing that. What I notice though is that the really successful IT service businesses provide a generally poor service - and this may be precisely why they are successful.
In the industrial revolution, the luddites failed to win the war. For IT the outcome is yet unclear but it worries me that maybe the new luddites are winning.

Piano Grande at Govt House

Went to a brilliant concert at Govt House Ballroom - "Piano Grande" based on 2 Fazioli pianos and a pound of Perth pianists (yes I had to Google for that collective noun) playing pieces for pairs of performers plus permutations [ok, that's enough with the Ps :Ed].. umm particularly pertaining Poulenc?
I'm not that into pianos but this was by turns breathtaking, reflective and indulgent. My hat's off to Mark Coughlan and all involved for such an opportune event.

Deeper than Twittering?

Some days it's obvious to me that I'm never quite going to be a Twitter kind of guy. I read some incoming tweets, which prompt me to think something. Then I flail about trying to make that insight fit into 140 characters. By the time I decide I can't see a way to make it fit, I realise I should have just started writing a blog post in the first place. Am I up myself to think that I'm too deep for twitter - or inept at being succinct?
The irony is that I'm often scathing about how long most books are. Why it takes so many words to say so little so often is a continuing puzzle. Is this a conundrum of language or our attitude as writers?
I had thought that the web (well, hypertext really) would provide a solution - that we would write our assertions and then sub-link to the substantiations. Yet, I don't see much of that around and certainly haven't led the charge myself.