Kerala, India

Kerala backwaters

So Deum

Yet another flap over the ridiculous salt levels in Western diets, as documented in an article the NY Times. The article alludes to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which claims lowering salt levels (i.e., in processed foods) could have as big a public-health payoff as dramatic reductions in smoking levels.
Much as I love a big crunchy pickle, I've rarely eaten them in recent decades. I'm increasingly uneasy when I resort to something like jarred pesto, tasty and wonderful as it may be. Besides viewing chronically high salt consumption as dangerous, I believe it numbs the tastebuds.
California may impose limits on sodium content. Bravo. Will it happen nationally? Would Canada do likewise?
I have doubts. The U.S. in particular treats almost all products as creatures of the unbridled marketplace, and powerful interests have a very big stake in this absence of regulation -- as we've witnessed, depressingly, in the recent near-collapse of the U.S. financial system. Unfettered capitalism -- including the rights of these powerful interests to treat consumers as dupes, or profitable addicts -- is a sacred cow. Witness the failure of meaningful (or any) healthcare reform. The US government itself has become merely an agent in this closed circuit. Yes, Democrats used to believe in progressive government activism, but even with their current stellar alignment (Senate, House and Presidency), inaction prevails.
Processed foods are extremely profitable, and are predicated on high concentrations of a triumvirate of very cheap, addictive and harmful ingredients -- sodium, hydrogenated oils, and high-fructose corn syrup (the latter is called "glucose/fructose" in Canada). Moreover, the companies that churn them out are parts of very large and powerful companies.

What’s in a Word? Microcontent and its discontents

Evocative, with just a whiff of zeitgeist, “microcontent” would seem to be a word whose time has come. Wikipedia states that the term was “systematically introduced and defined” in 2002 by Anil Dash as content “formatted for presentation” in small contexts, whether email clients, Web browsers or handheld devices. However, the word was coined at least four years earlier when Web design theorist Jakob Nielsen described microcontent more in terms of its extreme brevity and its descriptive and attention-grabbing purposes – headlines, subject tags and links of just forty to sixty characters, “pearls of clarity” intended to describe fuller content, i.e. “to explain your macrocontent” (1998).

Without explicitly defining the word, Bryan Alexander uses “microcontent” liberally in his essay “Web 2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” (2006). In so doing, he suggests vastly wider and more insidious implications for the term. At first mention, Alexander (right) italicizes the word (either for emphasis or to underscore its foreignness) and equates microcontent with the “content chunks” that populate the social Web and set Web 2.0 apart from “the Web as book”. In other words, microcontent defines the Social Web. These discreet chunklets – brief text, a single photograph, etc. – can be shared, shuffled, merged and aggregated.

Microcontent, then, isn’t merely brief. It is content divorced from any container, whether “book” or webpage. Alexander apparently rejects Dash’s notion that microcontent is “formatted” at all. Users “personalize their bit of del.icio.us…with a minimally designed page” (Alexander, 2006). Textual microcontent possesses no visual form of its own – no layout, no font; it is amorphous, meant for extrusion and moulding. Alexander implies as much when he asks, “when will enough readers peruse Web sites through RSS and other microcontent readers to warrant resigning campus public electronic presentations?” (2006). He seems to suggest that “presentation” is strictly client-side – determined by the bland mould of the RSS reader or email client – and that this stands to render the static page (including its design and presentation) irrelevant, at which point publishers of information can abandon (or as he puts it, “resign”) these efforts altogether.

This is a giant leap and stands to cut an entire layer of expression and communication out of the picture – the “formal” layer of layout, typography, the synergy of text + image. These visual attributes are, of course, a legacy of print; Web 1.0 had been evolving into a collection of opulent magazines (and many poorly designed ones). The Web 2.0 paradigm of microcontent on-the-fly gives rise to sameness and efficiency via a limited number of generic, monotonous templates (for example, the one enclosing this very blog posting). The publisher loses control over aesthetic and communicative complexity and individuality.

Alexander rightly notes that “users have generated this material for decades” (2006). Indeed, content in general has been scaling down, as evident, for example, in news, where the public’s appetite for television-news brevity gave rise to USA Today’s shorter, informal style and likewise a greater quotient of “bites” in magazines and newspapers generally. However, microcontent’s mobility goes a stage further in redefining mass media. One needn’t “go to” the NewYorkTimes.com when one can set up feeds that excise portions of that newspaper from the whole and pull those chunks to one’s desktop. Thus whereas the Times’ website emulates the print newspaper’s ability to organize content visually, with size (e.g. headline) and placement (e.g. top of page, front of newspaper), the feed eliminates that organization entirely – and the majority of content along with it. The reader no longer scans the “world today” as determined by professionals working for corporations; rather, he pre-selects his subject areas, allows algorithms to cherry-pick his content from various sources, and largely tunes out. As we scan Bloglines instead of individual newspapers, our worldview becomes increasingly specialized and blinkered.

Meantime, for those who still visit newspapers, the Times increasingly features “blog” articles, distinguishable from news or traditional commentary less by their brevity than their chatty informality, up-to-the-second breathlessness, and openness to user comments. Thus, microcontent assumes its own aesthetic parameters. Though written by professional journalists, these blog entries conform to the style of the blogosphere, e.g. off-the-cuff opinion replete with typos and other errors, giving them a street-level authenticity lacking in heavily structured and edited news copy. Microcontent reflects a society both levelled by democracy and disillusioned with power structures. It also suggests a reassertion of latent orality.

The “lowered barrier[s] to entry” make it far easier to generate or read microcontent “than beginning an article or book” (Alexander, 2006). We now “find our own micro-audiences among friends and colleagues; we self-reference and share” (McCallum, 2007). Indeed, a conceit of microcontent is its promise of turning us all into writers and editors – even into librarians, given the rise of folksonomy, which is itself microcontent in that tags shrink the catalogue record (or citation) down to personal informality, subverting librarian notions of “authority record” and “authority control” and replacing them with democratic (and, again, amorphous) tag clouds.

The question might be: can we trust ourselves in place of professionals. Like the term “microcontent”, “factoid” is a word of ambiguous usage, connoting both brief fact and dubious claim. (When Norman Mailer coined it in the early 1970s, he meant lurid, distortional journalism.) Microcontent may assume similar baggage, as shared and shuffled ‘chunks’ become increasingly decontexualized, their origins suspect. Alexander and others herald microcontent’s potential in social learning and fostering expression among students. But it also poses educational challenges. As fragmented and fluid social currency, microcontent can undermine important concepts like intellectual property, not to mention personal accountability, gravitas, and the finality of a finished product, all of which demand (and teach) care and precision (McCallum 2007). The bigger challenge is "getting social software adopted in meaningful ways within schools" (Sessums, 2006).

Alexander, Bryan. "Web 2.0: a New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?." Educause. Mar.-Apr. 2006. 28 Nov. 2007 .

McCallum, Larry. "Re:Connection of Web2.0 and Pedagogy." Making Connections. 5 Dec. 2007. 5 Dec. 2007 .

Sessums, Christopher D. "Cultural Implications of Social Software, Teaching, and Learning: Ready or Not." Eduspaces. 20 Dec. 2006. 2 Dec. 2007 .

a whole lotta mashin' goin' on

Lots of debate lately (in blogs and the press) about the other side of the social Web -- its populist watering-down of the Web (which of course is itself a populist form of publishing).

Author Andrew Keen has ruffled feathers with his book The Cult of the Amateur, How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy, as reported recently in The Globe & Mail and elsewhere.

As usual I'm caught in the middle, or perhaps the muddle. As a librarian, my imperative has been to embrace the social Web. Yet I've spent the last 10 years teaching students and others that online article databases are better than the Web because the articles are written by professionals and scholars. As Keen -- a Silicon Valley entrepreneur -- points out, however, populist (Web 2.0) websites have flooded the Web with amateurism (photos, writing, video, etc.). This makes it tougher for the pros & scholars to be heard, or make a living, for that matter.

Another Globe article on the 'duality of Wikipedia' points out that Wikipedia's articles on pop-cultural trivia -- e.g. the character John Locke on the TV series Lost -- are typically longer than articles with the same name on important topics -- e.g. the great philosopher John Locke.

The contemporary educational philosopher Neil Postman once wrote how news telecasts reduce everything (from great tragedies to celebrity nonsense) to a lowest-common-denominator of equal significance, by means of segues such as "and now this", which allow the newscaster to jump between unrelated topics, both grave and trite.

The problem with Wikipedia, of course, is the lack of accountability. No specific person is responsible for correcting errors or editing for brevity. And much the same holds for the blogosphere, with its unfounded opinions and endless rehashing of ideas and rumours. Should I be blogging? Arguably not -- I'm no longer a journalist and so I no longer have an earned place in public discourse, nor the qualifications to take part. Perhaps my blog entries are merely derivative mashups of contemporary opinion. Unedited vanities. Welcome to the new media and my 5 minutes of fame. Received wisdom and distillations of what I happen to catch in the media, refracted through my limited understanding, from my particular place in the world.

Which brings me to mashups, which are arguably the essence of today's re-hash culture. The accompanying photo (above) shows one of my own mashups hanging on the wall of a museum. I did the picture of an Arabian man in traffic four years ago, in Photoshop, long before I'd heard the term "mashup", and likely before the word was coined (or at least applied to photographic art).

And the picture you see here is itself a mashup, generated at the site Dumpr, which lets you insert any old photo on your hard drive into one of four museum settings. So there you have it -- a mashup within a mashup. Don't get me wrong, though -- mashups are a lot of fun, and an art form in their own right. A populist art form. Hey, this is remix culture, baby!

a pissy polysomnogram

Seven or eight weeks ago I spent a bizarre night at a sleep clinic in a nondescript light-industrial area near Hamilton's downtown. Since I've been taking sleeping pills for several months, my doctor thought it advisable that I do one of these sessions (a polysomnogram) to determine whether anything specific and unknown was causing me to wake up during the night.

So I arrived at 8 p.m. as directed, and the waiting room was full of jolly, corpulent men noisily discussing their sleep apnea, and how you can buy either the $300 CPAP machine or the $800 CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine. Heavy people with excess soft tissue around their airways seem to be more prone to obstructive apnea, a condition where you routinely undergo nocturnal non-breathing episodes, usually causing you to snore and wake up suddenly with a snort. (Central sleep apnea, the other type, is when you stop breathing for lack of effort, as though you can't be bothered. That sounds more like me.)

All the seats being full, I waited off to one side, hoping desperately that I wouldn't be sharing a room with any of these chronic snorers. One guy would wave his arms while talking and chortling excitedly, causing his shoulder to press against the steel disk that activates the handicap electric doors — and so over and over again the doors swung open and closed for no one, in time to this fellow's effusions. Some were there for a return visit — which you're obliged to do if your first visit suggests you're a candidate for a CPAP machine. This filled me with dread — besides the cost, I wanted no part of living with a bedside machine, let alone a mask strapped over my face every night.

After a while I was given a long form to fill out, asking whether I had twitchy legs (restless leg syndrome), etc. Then I waited again. Eventually orderlies began ushering groups of three and four into an inner area. One short, older guy seemed momentarily lost, staring around blank and confused as his wife bade him goodnight and left him there.

The relative calm was welcome, but then I was ushered down the same corridor with a couple of others. By now a few women had joined the 90% male group. We arrived at another waiting room, this one full of the same boisterous clients as I'd seen in the outer one, only now they were all guffawing at an episode of Survivor. I dragged a chair as far from the TV as possible and tried to read.

When my name was called again, an older Filipino woman led me down another corridor to a room with four dentists' chairs. I sat in one while she fussed around me for a good half hour, applying gels to parts of my head, chest and legs and then taping wires of various colors to those same spots. I found it strange having gel smeared on my hair, and Rosa spoke very little. Meanwhile, this same routine was happening to two or three other patients around the room. One guy was attended to by a very chatty gay orderly, making me happy enough that I'd wound up with laconic Rosa. No one else seemed to appreciate how weird the whole scene was.

When Rosa was finished, I had multicolored plumes of wires sprouting Medusa-like from all over me, most of them terminating in a box. Soon, carrying my box, I followed Rosa back down the hall to a small room with (what a relief!) just one bed, and a common bathroom across the hall.

Rosa explained that she would be sitting in a room down the hall monitoring my heart rate, brainwaves, breathing, leg movements, what have you. I would also be observable on closed-circuit TV and audible via microphones. If I needed to go wee-wee during the night, I should just call out her name in the dark and she'd come and unhook me so I could carry my box into the men's room.

I dreaded having to express such abject infantile dependency — calling out something akin to mom...? mom...? in the darkness. So even though I was hardly bursting to go, I took the opportunity, prehookup, to carry my box — called a headbox — over to the urinals and do my level best.

By now it was nearly 11:30 — well over three hours since I'd arrived at the clinic, and well past my bedtime, given that next morning I would have to drive home across town, shower & eat, and then drive back across town to work. And as it happened, I did not have a good sleep at the sleep clinic.

Turning in bed with all those wires was not easy. And sure enough, a couple of hours into my uneasy slumber, I had to go. I felt ridiculous calling out "Rosa" in a dark room, waiting half a minute, and then calling "Rosa" louder. Then her nasal voice crackled over the intercom asking what I needed, and I had to explain my humble wants to a disembodied voice. Soon I was staggering toward the urinals again, dressed in a gown, clutching my headbox, and cursing my perverse bladder, which normally gets me through the night just fine, thank you.

Very rarely, too, do I wake up with a snort — perhaps once a year. Yet that night, even as I was dreading that they might determine I had sleep apnea, I woke up twice with a snort. Perhaps I was influenced by having listened to all those sleep-apnea sufferers in the waiting rooms, I don't know. But in the weeks since, recalling those snorts, I've wondered how I would fend them off (tell them to stuff their CPAPs?) if they concluded from my report that I needed another night at the clinic and then, likely, a machine. My father-in-law suggested that all I might need is a tennis ball taped to my back to keep me from sleeping supine — a folk remedy that seemed, frankly, to make about as much sense as a CPAP machine.

However, yesterday my GP showed me my polysomnogram report, and I don't have sleep apnea — something I pretty much knew anyway. Nor hypopnea (partial obstructions lasting more than 10 seconds an episode). I do experience routine episodes, lasting less than 10 seconds, of sub-par breathing, but nothing, apparently, to be concerned about. Nothing was mentioned about restless-leg syndrome, either. It suggested I might suffer from mood disorders or anxiety, and concluded ... wait for it ... that I take sleeping pills. In fact, the same pills I've been taking.

Soul & Salsa

Nearly two months now since CBC FM (or "Radio 2") relaunched itself in its own heavily branded image.

The operative word here is "image". As Lawrence Welk used to exclaim during my childhood, "Turn up the bubble machine-ah". Or, as they never tire of saying now on Radio 2 (much though I tire of hearing it), "wherever music takes you." It's always said with a very big smile (you can tell when someone's speaking with a smile on the radio).

Katie Malloch, predicably, has been elevated from Sunday-night obscurity to primetime (6 to 8) every weeknight. Predictable, because her blend of poise and verve, her apparently sincere love of jazz, are impeccable. She was/is the best voice on Radio 2, and was underexposed. Now, she's 10 hours a week at dinnertime. What's lost in the bargain? Unsurprisingly, her program's been watered down from consistently high-caliber concert and studio performances into a breezy affair heavy on dinner-friendly jazz, soul and salsa.

I don't want to sound cranky. Granted, the station was tired in the extreme and needed a revamp. For example, Danielle Charbonneau's unfocused, limply named "Music For a While" occupied prime time on weekday evenings, playing tepid classical interspersed with her too-careful, painfully-perfect French-flavored diction.

A welcome addition prior to the re-launch has been Tom Allen in the morning slot -- at least, when he curbs his enthusiasm and avoids becoming manic. Jurgen Gothe still plies the 3-to-6 rush-hour airwaves, and still sounds very tired -- I'm certainly tired of the salon music and accordion tangos that lard his program, Disc Drive -- though it was funny hearing him chafing at having to do his share of "plugging" and "selling" of the new radio format.

Interesting how much of the plugging and selling over the past few months has emphasized how the new format is concentrating on broadcasting taxpayer-subsidized concerts ("from coast to coast to coast", as the cliche goes) -- a sort of your-tax-dollars-at-work justification (i.e. our tax dollars are somehow under-utilized unless these often obscure concerts find their way onto the airwaves). Evidently, that should appeal to the traditional Radio 2 demographic -- cranky old classical music buffs who've been somewhat brushed aside by the Radio 2 makeover's appeal to younger audiences.