Came across this article today. Not going to comment on it right now, or maybe ever, although I do have a lot to say on the subject. What interests me more at the moment is how the reader comments serve as a perfect examplar of a familiar phenomenon.

Frankly, my biases cause me to see it as more than a familiar phenomenon; it honestly seems to me to be nearly universal. It’s most easily noticed in online environments because of the easy contrast between texts, but it’s likely just as common elsewhere.

So, the phenomonen:

An article appears stating that Institution X has made a movement against foo, although they continue to allow bar. A generally pro-foo crowd encounters the article and immediately gets its collective knickers twisted. That’s understandable, of course, and is frankly uninteresting.

There may be one or five reasonable comments, but inevitably and quickly someone jumps in and says that banning foo is a travesty, an outrage. This sets the tone for almost everything that will follow.

That itself isn’t the interesting bit, though, not yet.

What fascinates me is this phenomenon: In the wake of the first highly emotional pro-foo, anti-Institution X comment, commenters will maintain the outraged, insulted tone but will begin to insinuate that Institution X has banned both foo and bar.

Even more interesting is that once the high tempers have started settling down, posters will begin saying that, while they are generally in favor of foo, they could actually understand getting rid of foo but only if bar were retained.

The conversation will continue along this line with anger ebbing and flowing but with the consensus remaining that Institution X could reasonably have jettisoned foo if it had made a commitment to retaining bar.

Which, if you go back and read the article that sparked outrage, will turn out to be exactly what Institution X actually did.

This really knocks my socks off. It makes me terribly upset, as I am a proponent of literacy in general and of this stuff we call “information literacy” in particular, but at the same time it fills me with armchair-sociologist glee. What we see, time and again and preserved for the ages, is real-time demonstration of the fact that opinion is formed not in response to the object of opinion but in response to commentary on the object.

This is especially intriguing in the online world, and especially in relation to the article/commentary liked above, because it shatters what otherwise seems like a reasonable supposition: When we see that people form their opinions from other people’s opinions rather than from the actual facts of the matter, we might tend to assume that they do so because the facts of the matter are at some remove, that the facts would have to be separately accessed and contemplated with some (major or minor) difficulty.

What we see, though, is that proximity to the case being judged is wholly irrelevant to the opinion-forming process. Whether the report one responds to is locked away in a dusty microfilm cabinet or is sitting right there above the comment thread doesn’t matter; the typical respondent will base his or her response on what other people are saying about the report.

It’s beautiful, in a soul-destroying kind of way.

So I called dude this morning and told him I was filing suit on Monday.

Ten minutes later he, for the first time since November, returned one of my calls. He claimed he’d been trying to get in touch with me for a month but that my number wasn’t working. Mirabile dictu, his problem getting through to me cleared up at the exact same moment I told him we were going to court.

He started in with his explanation, starting out by saying the car title was back at his family home in Illinois and meandering through to him saying he was still waiting for it to be issued before I was able to break in and say that all of the above was irrelevant, that I’d run a Carfax report earlier in the week and had seen a title had still not been issued in his name, that under Missouri law the sale hadn’t been valid in the first place, and that I just wanted my money back.

He said he’s in St. Louis and will call me when he gets back in town tomorrow. He strongly implied without explicitly saying that he will be returning my money. I suspect there will be more drama tomorrow, if he actually bothers to show up.

Ugh.

Watching Velvet Goldmine again, I once more wonder about Jonathan Rhys Myers: reez, rize, rees, or rice?

Also, is there any rule of thumb for determining whether a person using three names is using a middle name or one of those unhyphenated compound surnames, like Conan Doyle or (I think) Lloyd Webber?

The guy I “bought” the car from still won’t return my calls, even after I threatened taking legal action. Some research has shown that not only was the sale invalid due to his not having a title issued in his name at the time of sale, but in Missouri we were both actually engaging in an illegal activity by signing the bill of sale.

Looks like I’ll be filing suit in small claims court later this week, but I’m not optimistic about the outcome. In this state, at least, the small claims courts do not have the authority to actually enforce their decisions, which makes the whole ordeal seem more than a little absurd. Big-boy court is pretty much out of the question, as I’d be spending more in filing and lawyer’s fees than I paid for the car. It’s possible that a ruling in my favor would include the defendant having to pay those fees in addition to the cost of the car, but it’s a mighty big gamble.

So, grr.

So here’s why I have been increasingly anti-prolific over the last couple of years, leading to near-silence over the last few months:

My attention span is shot. Spent. Kaput. Gones-ville.

I have no idea why, not even a theory. I have just found it increasingly difficult, over the last 18 months or so, to sit still and work on a single thing for an extended period of time. I can work up lengthy blog posts and emails and such in my head, but when I sit down to type I just…don’t want to put in the effort, I guess.

I can’t even sit down and watch a movie all the way through these days. I can make it through a TV show, sometimes even several hours’ worth of individual shows, but I can’t devote the equivalent length of time to a single self-contained work.

It’s weird, and it’s annoying, and it seems very much unlike me except for the fact that it is me. So what’s up with that, huh?

People often come up and say something like “I’ve been searching for information on this subject for hours, and I can’t find anything!” For quite some time, my approach to such an appeal (once the reference interview had established exactly what the seeker sought) was to lean back, stare off into space, and contemplate various subtle means of sneaking toward information that was obviously well-hidden.

Now, after sufficient experience, Ijust plug the most cussedly obvious search query into the appropriate interface and almost inevitably pull up exactly what’s needed.

And it’s amazing, right? Because (most of) these querents are pretty damned bright, have years of practice using computers, and (usually) have genuinely put in some considerable and frustrating time trying to find the info.

But…but I guess they look at the idea of information the wrong way? They don’t have a handle on the nature of how information is identified, or how (as in the open-Web world indexed by Google) it identifies itself?

It fascinates me, really, and to be honest it gets right to the heart of what this Information Literacy stuff is about. To be honest again, its also the sort of stuff that the IL curricula I’ve seen doesn’t seem to be really trying to teach, relying instead on goosed-up tool and interface tutorials that research shows have rearely been particularly helpful to anyone.

I don’t blame the people teaching IL courses, though, because I suspect the real issue, the thing that needs to be addressed and remedied through education, is something pretty deep within the psyche. Undergraduate education in general tends to avoid dealing with deep connections, at least in the first couple of years, and this is something that definitely requires a lot of neural knitting. So, what to do?

Amanda at Pandagon has found what she mistakes for yet another piece of poorly done anti-choice, anti-woman propaganda:

This is something much more grand and glorious, though; it is, in fact, the announcement preparing us for the imminent salvation/enslavement of the human race!

It is clear to me that this pamphlet exists to reveal what I had long suspected. We all have heard rumors that Thomas Edison used his secret time-travel technology to arrange a conference of great minds. There has been speculation that the great man used this session to demonstrate technologies suggested by Margaret Sanger, but the fruit of such speculation proved too fanciful for use in jelly or pie.

But now the truth can be told!

In 1847, aided by anachronistic superscience and the Holy Spirit, George Washington and Jesus Christ fathered an ear baby.

After a lengthy gestation and longer infancy, for the Way of the Ear is fine but slow, the first exponent of Homo auriculus wobbles ready on his toddler feet and can be revealed as the Grand New High Exalted Master of lowly womb-born humankind. O come, let us adore him, for if we don’t we will feel the hot agony of his damnifying gaze just that much sooner.

Reading through Heinlein in Dimension, a fairly non-critical[1] book-length criticism of the SF author’s work as of the late 1960s, I ran across this passage:

Backgrounds are always more difficult to invent than plots. Once worked out, any detailed background can provide room for a number of plots, characters, and situations that are completely independent of each other, and any story that is set against such a detailed background automatically has a solid base.

Am I completely alone in thinking that this describes the exact opposite of the problem facing people who want to write seriously in fantasy and science fiction? I know I can throw out two or three fairly detailed artificial worlds a week, but damned if I can think of anything to put in them that I might personally want to read.

[1] “Non-critical” here does not mean hagiographic or unfailingly positive; the author of the work in question actually takes Heinlein’s prose and ability to task. The term here is used to say the author’s approach consists entirely of a “well, I like it or I don’t like it” method rather than couching his readings in a more illuminating critical framework.

Pete has recently left many comments and in doing so has made me realize how horrible I’ve been about keeping up. Will try to remedy this soon.