Counternarrative—Modes of Facebook Hypocrisy

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

So far, it isn’t my friends. My friends, you lot there on Facebook, seem to be mainly a pretty rational group most of the time. No, it’s friends of friends and others my friends follow that they might “like” a post of. The result of that, as we all know, is that in the strange code of conduct of Facebook, I am privileged to see not only that you liked something that someone or some entity elected to post in their dimly lit little corner of the chativerse, but I can see what was said, and I can see what their friends and admirers said in response.

When a tragedy occurs of the like of the still unfolding horrible terrorist attack in Paris on Friday evening, some resonance, some harmonic, vibrates, it seems, across the Facebook Community (that’s in caps, because Facebook consider that we all, all one-and-a-half billion of us all told, constitute a community, and that we have “Standards,” which they define and uphold). What I have seen in response to the attacks, in addition to the outpouring of concern and horror is the response to the response. The immediate result of seeing the apparently prevalent wave of sympathetic and empathetic expressions we elect to share with one another—out of whatever humane urge that motivates us to do so, if only to relieve our own nascent feelings of revulsion or fear or plain garden variety sadness by sharing them—is a seemingly instantaneous counternarrative.

There are, apparently, in every crowd certain individuals who, demonstrably shallow and not troubled either by a need, or possibly not impeded by the ability to act on such a need, to think at all about what comes off the ends of their fingertips, or their thumbs before they commit their sentiments to cyberspace.

According to this counternarrative, every utterance and act of sympathy—it’s become popular, in an adoption of a graphic meme of solidarity, to cover our profile photos with a wash of colored stripes (it was rainbow hued when the Supreme Court upheld gay marriage as a right according to the law of the land; it’s currently tri-color in keeping with the national flag and colors of France)—is an act of hypocrisy. Why? Because we privileged inhabitants of Facebook-land clearly, on no greater probative evidence than the size of the response from all over the FB network immediately in reaction to receiving news of the tragedy, are only concerned when the victims are white—an argument amply reinforced if the suspected (and now declared) perpetrators are, in the squirm-worthy taxonomy of current geopolitics and religion-based vilification, not white, purely by way of being, allegedly and ostensibly, followers of the Prophet.

We have not shown sufficient and equal concern, in force of hand-wringing, colors unfurled, anguish expressed in the fragile coherent English of expressing grief and shock, for other downtrodden sufferers on this orb of suffering as we circle the sun. What about the Lebanese suicide bombers in Beirut two days previous? What about the now seemingly endless stream of refugees strewn across the roadways from the Middle East to the gates of Europe? What about the dead of Sudan? Or Ethiopia? The repressed hordes of Myanmar, Indonesia, Tibet…

One of the diminishing list of virtues of Facebook is that it allows you to peek at whatever information any member of the Community elects to share with the public at large. In most instances you at least get to see a sampling of what they deem worthy of sharing with their dear ones, not so dear ones, passing acquaintances, and the ether-bound flotsam who penetrate the boundary of our friendship checkpoint somehow. I’ll not even comment, save for this, about the hapless individuals who seek merit by collecting as many friends as possible. Ostensibly this is a sign of the validity of the only shred of express proof that their counternarratives about our wretched bias—we unhappy privileged whiteys who favor our own as we assert our privilege and exceptional worth—and that is, as they fervently assert, we are one world, and one race and one people.

Well, my wont is pretty much to exercise little to no interest whatsoever in most of the friends of my friends—not because of any misanthropy, or lack of sociability; I’d simply rather wait for a proper introduction, and these are thin on the ground, shall we say? Nevertheless with the latest spate, more of a dribble, to be honest, but even a few drops of acid are corrosive, of the kind of self-righteous counternarrative posts I decry here, I have been lured into a peek at the profile pages of the perpetrators.

What have I found? Though hardly a sound forensic foundation for argument, it nevertheless suffices me to be able to conclude that, within the confines of this self-selecting gated universe of fellow Facebookers, there is nary a mention on the pages of these individuals concerning the plight of their brethren in suffering and heartache, of any skin tint, white, yellow, brown, black or the myriad permutations represented by the earth’s total population. So much for one world. So much for empathy.

What possibly the world likes even less than someone who habitually wears his or heart on his sleeve, is when the same individual, so accoutered, uses the threadbare garb of shallow sentiment as the uniform of a self-appointed scold.

I know where my heart and my feelings and my empathy lies, and I am never chary of expressing my censure when there is any evidence anywhere in the world of malice, injustice, or harm perpetrated on any victim, especially the innocent ones. I beseech my friends who are so quick to approve the easy sentiments of the self-righteous to consider that by encouraging the circulation of these empty thoughts, readily donned, and just as readily cast off, as the mood changes and the parade passes, you are cheapening the value of the humanity of those who care deeply and have only so much capacity for grief.

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The Pro

Approximate Reading Time: 7 minutes
Sometimes the old ways are best.

Sometimes the old ways are best.


Wednesday this week was a day I had been anticipating. November 11 was the announced date of the availability of a new Apple product, the iPad Pro, introduced in September to great fanfare (and my immediate optimistic enthusiasm) as a new generation of tablet. The tablet, especially the iPad, which is the market leader in a number of dimensions, price, popularity, performance, has been on the decline by the usual economic measures, not the least of them being growth of sales and percentage of corporate revenue for Apple. Nevertheless, the Pro seemed to augur a new stage of development for this particular species of device: a professional tool, highly mobile, that could be used not only to enable, but to facilitate creative innovation, from concept to execution for a world more and more populated by expressive and informative media that are digital, starting from the origin of an idea.

To be introduced along with the significantly enlarged form and screen size of the tablet are two ancillary or collateral or auxiliary input devices: a keyboard and a stylus. The screen of the new version of iPad is more or less the same size as the screens of the smallest laptop products offered by Apple, the MacBook line of computers. The latter are still, more or less, the only growth category in the slowly withering category of personal computer devices that are not strictly mobile. All this is to say that the world at large is slowly becoming dominated by digital devices that fit in pockets, however large and capacious they may have to be to accommodate some of the larger smartphones.

It was to be, and, for all I know, still is to be expected that new devices like the iPad Pro, as well as the hybrid Surface Book, which is Microsoft’s entry into what marketers like to call the “crossover” category of tablets qua notebook computer (the former ad man in me cannot overcome the impulse to recall that old joke, I think from SNL, “It’s a mouthwash! It’s a floor polish!”). It has a keyboard, but it also can be used strictly as a touchscreen device. It also has been designed (this is somewhat more true of the Apple product, but applies as well to the design ethos of the Microsoft product) to be that much more precise in its responsiveness and accuracy in the rendition of design elements: both type and graphic elements, photographic or manually drawn. To reinforce the perception of the iPad Pro as a professional device is the Apple Pencil, the company’s first venture into a discrete digital stylus offering (the doomed Apple Newton, in the 90s, had a stylus as a necessary adjunct to using it, but it was just a stick, not a connected digital instrument). The sainted Steve Jobs famously allegedly put the kibosh on the development of any such capability in association with the iPad concept by dictating, in an off-handed brief encyclical to the world, that a fingertip was stylus enough for anyone.

Nevertheless, in terms of technical specifications, it seemed to me that the Apple Pencil raised the product category of stylus to a new level of accomplishment for the engineers—or so it seemed back in September with the onstage product demo. It is responsive and significantly more precise in terms of the rendering almost immediately and visibly with the necessary synchrony of where the tip of the instrument, which is about as sharp (or dull) as a slightly dull graphite pencil or, perhaps, a Bic ballpoint pen, meets the slick glass surface of the screen. Beyond that it falls short in exactly the same way all styli on digital touchscreen instruments do. It is a unique form of recording instrument and must be learned to the expert level to exploit fully. I imagine the heuristics are similar to any new form of technology, meant to analogize an existing, especially what I’ll call a natural, form. Playing a musical instrument, or learning to perform arthroscopic surgery, or learning to perform arthroscopic surgery using a robot across the operating theater with the patient separated from the surgeon, flying by wire, operating a rover on another planet. All of it is possible, and any of these examples doubtless provides a context for creating new forms of art (in the broadest sense). In the case of the Apple Pencil, or any digital stylus, what it, the thing itself, does not do is replicate in any way, for one, the act of drawing on materials made of fibrous layers of something that at one time was growing: a tree, a reed, a young animal, flattened into a thin pliant sheet—so as to create a surface receptive to microscopically colored media prepared in a form of a sharpened stick or paint or ink, in short, material that may, at once, lubricate, suspend, and release the colorant as the instrument is dragged across the surface of the substrate. I mean of course ink, or graphite, or chalk, or paint, or dye used to make a record of one’s strokes. Whether it’s paper in its myriad forms, or parchment, canvas, or other kinds of cloth, or, alternatively, wood or metal or the stone wall of a cave, and with the laborious technology required to make these surfaces receptive to the colored material, there’s “tooth” to the surface which variously impedes and permits the progress of the recording medium onto the tactile surface. But there’s no way polished plastic molded to a point pulled across a glass surface can mimic the sensory experience of these phenomena.

I’m not commenting on and surely not denigrating the genius of programmers who have found ways of digitally replicating the act, and the result of the action, of nearly every technique invented in the entire history of homo pictor, whether it’s spray painting, pencil drawing or creating a cyanotype photographic image. However, it’s the result that is replicated, or at worst mimicked, and not the techniques or means to create the artifact with the appearance of a specimen prepared in the canonical manner. I could lapse into a very long digression about the increasingly resonant meanings and applicability of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” whose increasing relevance to the existential aspects of daily life as time progresses in Western countries has a crescendo-like impact on my sensibilities at least.

But I think I’ll stick with what I set out to say, which is to critique the new Apple product, and to articulate why I decided not to buy it. The latter phrase will alert only people who know me personally and fairly well, know me for the inveterate and, I’m sure, sometimes seemingly unquestioning, wholly credulous, perpetually positive fan boy that my money and its free flow into the coffers of Apple Inc. would have seemed to attest in the past. However, the last three product introductions, for me, have proven a bust: the MacBook laptop (in three simulacrums of other kinds of metal than the aluminum of which it is crafted, including two tones of gold), the Apple Watch, including the version that actually is made of gold and priced starting at north of 17 thousand dollars, and now the iPad Pro. My first criterion is whether conceptually, especially as depicted in Apple’s devilishly alluring product videos, but, more importantly, once I can put the object in my hands, it instills that acquisitive impulse, usually fashioned in the compelling form of a felt need, as opposed to the more likely, and more accurate, covetous want. Without that impulse, I can’t persuade myself, even with considerable powers of logic, sometimes used self-reflexively, but still sophistically, that I should part company with significant amounts of cash.

In the end, what impressed me, after a full half hour at the Apple Store, unmolested and uninterrupted, with the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil, and the so-called Smart Keyboard, was that these were products perhaps as expressive as any, if not even more so, of the Apple genius for slick design. But our household is filled with devices, none at the moment quite as new as introduced this week, but still representative of the same corporate ethos: tablets and phones, and computers, and music players, and dozens of accessories, converters, adapters and cables—and there are only two of us. And the iPad Pro is simply a very big iPad, and, despite Apple’s attempt to turn its size into a virtue, and for some, doubtless, a very large screen is exactly that, to me it’s clunky, and it has passed over some undefined boundary in my mind for what is an acceptable mass to carry around for a purportedly portable device (I hate the term “mobile,” and even more so as a noun; a wheelchair also is mobile—at the very least it must be conceded that it makes the person borne in it mobile when they would otherwise not be).

The Apple Pencil is now the premier exemplar of the category of digital stylus. Indeed, if Apple had lost its capability to trump all previous efforts by all other parties to dominate a category of digital device with the design and relentless rigor and simple beauty of it, I’d short my stock. The problem for me is that it is not that superior to the half dozen or so other styluses I have acquired, each of them at the time of acquisition the “state of the art” one way or another (and developed in the context of Apple purportedly considering category to be irrelevant pace Steve Jobs, who thought we should all be satisfied with the digital styli we were born with at the ends of the palms of our hands). I wish I still had all the money invested in those styli. They do work, and some not very much worse than the Apple Pencil, as Apple has no complete monopoly on clever engineers.

No I’ll skip it, and the keyboard, and the stylus, and I’ll reserve those discretionary funds, which I also remind myself I am very fortunate to have to enhance my resources for being creative when the mood strikes. There’s a lens for one of my cameras that I’m looking at, and am kind of fond of.

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On Charm—Are You Charming?

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Referencing a link on “Book of Life” website…

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