Useless Add-Ons

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It is never a surprise to discover that once-innovative human inventions have devolved under the weight of bogus improvements.

It seems to be a natural result of the things we invent that “refinements” added to perpetuate a product finally that turn into burdensome add-ons. Entropy is a guiding force that can sabotage “improvements.” This is certainly not true in every case. With exceptions, we made some great advances in the eradication of diseases like polio. We have also shrunk the world, making it easier to reach people over great distances. But it is never surprising when once-innovative human inventions devolve after attempts at refinement. Add -ons to software and hardware can easily weaken the core advantages of the earlier form of an application or product. No one would look at the later bloated versions of the original 1956 Ford Thunderbird and call them improvements. It was originally a coherent vision of a smaller and sporty car. In that era cars also had the advantage of real switches and knobs, not touchscreens. Am I the only one a touch screen seems to ignore? The “improvement” of this “rub and hope” ergonomics has left countless drivers unable to easily control key functions like heating and cooling. Auto-makers like them because they are cheap to make. And they look more cutting-edge. The first car that I owned was a Honda. . .  with a spoiler over the trunk. That addition was purely a case of form over function, with some personal vanity thrown in. My car never experienced wind-tunnel speeds.

If you get a chance to look, notice that a modern airline cockpit uses screens for displays, but relies on click knobs and real switches for critical controls. And, more generally, let’s not even pretend that flying in coach is still an exciting way to travel. You will pay more for a routine flight if you want the luxury of taking along a suitcase. One of the disadvantages of being a young traveler is that they don’t know what good service used to look like. In a mobbed Philadelphia airport a few weeks ago they were clearly the happiest people, apparently accepting their fates as just so much air cargo.

Customer service by phone-tree or closed-option questions is usually vastly different from actually speaking to an informed employee at the firm from whom you need help. “Resort fees” are now tacked on if a modest hotel has a swimming pool and a palm tree out front. Even the ostensible advantage of home audio with seven channels will usually result in a degraded soundscape created by low-quality speakers that lack the accuracy of a good two-channel (stereo) system.

The same pattern of devolution away from a useful tool happened  years ago when most universities gave up the standard practice of publishing a hard copy of their yearly “catalogue.” The book-length document listed all the courses offered at the institution, and the degree requirements for every undergraduate and graduate major. It gave even a marginal first-year student a firm statement of the  contract they had with an institution, good for all of the four years of their education. When all this necessary information disappeared into various obscure online corners, most of my advisees never bothered to track down and map their academic future, missing requirements and prerequisites in the fog of internet distraction. Some had to delay their graduation as a consequence of never bothering to plot how they would spend their four years.

Because my career has included a great deal of writing, I’ve been able to track various iterations of Microsoft’s Word for Windows, which has evolved over the years with many add-ons: among them, an “editor” function, dictation function, and loads of graphics capabilities seemingly borrowed from the company’s Publisher and Paint software. Some of the add-ons help. But others get in the way of Word’s core function as a tool for committing ideas to the page. Add in new promises of A.I. “help,” and we will no longer be crafting messages that are fully ours. Traditionally, our written or spoken words have been the best representations of who we really are: textual fingerprints of the self that can now be faked by a digital assistant.

 

Refining Communication as Feeling and Thinking

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,

treble staff

Feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of thought or  logic, but as an ingredient fully melted into the mix of communication.

We can communicate feelings in the tonalities of speech. Any actor needs to be able to pull off this feat. There’s a feeling of defiance in Clark Gable’s famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” or in Judy Garland’s tentative wonder that “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” But the ideal machine for feeling is music, with its cues imbedded in the ways that keys, chords, fifths, and so many other variations of the 12-note chromatic scale are used.  Yip Harburg’s words to Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow for the Wizard of Oz marry its central idea of yearning to a rising pitch sequence ending in a high C. He could have easily written affettuoso (“with feeling”) to set the tone for the music. Harburg famously noted that “Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling . . .” Music is the tonal and non-stipulative dimension of communication. It pushes the process of connecting into a larger sphere. It follows, as Harburg noted, that “a song makes you feel a thought:” a natural marriage of what is too often represented as polar opposites.

You can easily assess your response to music as feeling triggered by sound in this unusual example of Over the Rainbow—usually sung in a hopeful key of Ab Major—transposed here into a minor key. It conveys more of a feeling of melancholy than hope: not what we would expect to hear from a child with more visceral emotions. The unusual departure to a minor key version of the song  below by sillyjet invites us feel differently about what it means.

Why does this matter? Music is more than a metaphor here. Quite simply, like spoken language, music is another form of aurality  that reminds us that communication as a medium of exchange is not a one dimensional process. Like a phrase or a chord, any word from a source sets in motion a dynamic progression of listening and reacting that is more open-ended than the idea of communication as ‘exchange’ would suggest. In essence, our reception of another’s message triggers projections from within that surface in the form of feelings.

The use of language or its musical equivalents always have tendency.  Through our unique perceptions we are the co-creators of another’s message. So, feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of the logical, but as a sum of all of its parts melted into the mix.