Unwinding the STEM - why a career in tech is not my dream for my children

As Infocomm time grows nearer (for my non-professional connections,   Infocomm is the annual tradeshow for professional audiovisual industry) I think back towards a conversation I had at the Women in AV dinner with Kristin Rector of ListenTech. We'd been talking about family and, at the moment, about my then-seven year old daughter (in a development which is both predictable and a complete wonder to me, she's now eight. Parents will understand). Recker asked, as was fitting for the occasion, if I'd encourage her to go into the audiovisual or other technical field.  It's n obvious question with an obvious answer - STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields are, after all, the engine of the modern technology-centric economy. In an increasingly connected and tech-dependent world, we need people who understand science and tech just as much as future generations need to understand the technology which fuels their lives. So my answer was, of course, a completely equivocal "maybe. It depends."

Why? Three thoughts: reflections on what I value, the limits of technology, and the potential of the arts.

The Limits of Technology
I studied computer programming in high school and my early college years. After taking off the training-wheels of BASIC, we learned  FORTRAN and Pascal because those, of course, were the programming tools one needed in a science-based curriculum. I learned to navigate through directory trees in DOS. On the hardware side, I built some terrific High School Science projects utilizing individual logic gates on purpose-built integrated circuits - a toy car that redirects itself after collisions and a digital speech recorder with variable sample rates and playback speeds (the latter of which increased or decreased speed without changing frequency by repeating or cutting some data). Even if I hadn't forgotten more of my early programming than I have of my High School French lessons, these are specific skills which are, at this time,  quite obsolete.  

On a professional level, I had a terrific discussion about this very issue with one of my colleagues at SMW. His contention is that, while it's important for us to understand the capabilities of current technology, our greatest service is in "big picture" conceptual planning. It's nice to know exactly which product goes where, but what we excel at as consultants is creating an overall vision - and that is a much broader less narrowly technical skill.  My early AV education included learning the difference between component, composite, RGBHV, and S-video encoding. Two years ago we all learned about HDBaseT, another technology which is rapidly fading from the heard of AV system design to a side-note.  What is today indispensable will rapidly become legacy knowledge, little of which will be of any use.

Does that mean technology education is useless? Far from it. A solid education with an emphasis on theory and process can be portable, but I find it very easy to lose the forest for the trees. This is especially true for those who see the purpose of education - and this is more prevalent in STEM education - as a road to a better job. We trade the intrinsic reward of self-improvement for the extrinsic reward of a better living through application of new skill-sets. I fear - especially in the "T" and "E" facets of "STEM" - that this puts too much weight on learning to do "stuff", and not enough on understanding ideas and process. If my children are to pursue science or technology careers, I want it to be out of passion for learning how things work, not as some kind of glorified tradeschool.

Yes, we need to learn about technology. But more than that, we need to know how to think - and why.

The Power of the Arts
Two years ago I referenced a discussion I had with SMW's Rob Badenoch about IP-based transport systems. It's an interesting thought worth repeating here:

I'd said that an IP-based system allows us to create a "virtual" matrix to replace a physical one. His answer:
"no. It's not a matrix. It's making video sources available as a tool for a PC or other application. I'm sorry, that might be mere semantics."

A notebook is more valuable than a sliderule

No, it wasn't mere semantics. It was modifying the language used to describe a thing in order to better think about it in different ways. That is one practical value of a liberal arts education - we learn how to think, how to use words to shape our ideas and how to use ideas to shape the world. The ability to think about something in a different way is not only technology-agnostic, but portable to areas beyond technology.

Then, of course, there is the power and beauty in literature and philosophy. The ability to understand other cultures. The context to understand our own culture. Formal structures around which to base ethical discussions on the new quandaries technology brings us. The ability to answer "Why should we...?" as well as "How should we....?"

I've said before that, while it is the rocket scientist who gets us to the moon, it is the poet who gives us the dream of getting there.

My daughter has, as I said above, shown an aptitude for math. She's also shown an aptitude for poetry. Is one MORE worth nurturing than the other? Do we want to live in a world which is all function and no form, all practicality and no beauty? I do not. And I see the creation of beauty, even if for nothing more than its own sake, to be of great value.

What do we Value?
Another online discussion comes to mind. In the wake of baseball's annual celebration of Jackie Robinson, a commenter on New York Mets-related blog Amazin Avenue said this:

(by Ford it was later confirmed that he meant Henry, not Gerald or Betty). Bending AA's "no politics" rule until it nearly snapped, I pointed out that this is an odd, narrow, and parochial view of "most important". One major point is that it included nobody who contributed to culture; no composers, no writers, no thinkers. It also raises the question of what "important" means. Does one have to be nice to be important? One could argue that Mao has deeper footprints in history than many others listed. Yes, Ford changed the world of manufacturing. Did not people like, say, Marcel Duchamp change the direction of culture by making us question what art is? Was Kurt Vonnegut "important"? If you're a certain type of horror fan, can you escape the influence of HP Lovecraft?

In technology fields in general and the AV field in particular we create tools. Tools that can bring people together, that can make the world smaller, that can broadcast numerous visions and ideas to new audiences. Without content and without vision, all of those tools amount to deserted highways and empty containers.

We need more. We need thinkers and dreamers to guide us and to bring value to that which we do.

Would I encourage my children to enter a technology field? Again, perhaps. If for the right reasons.

But if they do, I'd encourage them to study and learn more than technology. I'd encourage them to be human first, and technologists second.

Instant Replay, Microphones, and when it's wrong to be right

How is instant replay like a gooseneck microphone?

As some of you might know, I'm a dedicated baseball fan - specifically of the New York Mets. In recent years, Major League Baseball has added an  instant replay system in which a dedicated team in a remote location are available to review close plays if a manager challenges them. Today, however, we're not talking about the technical aspects of replay, but about how a play reviewed yesterday made me think of discussions I've had about gooseneck, ceiling, and boundary microphones.

The Play 
This was a close play at home plate - one of the more exciting moments in a ballgame. The Mets were leading by a single run when Marlins outfielder Ichiro Suzuki tried to score from third base on a sharp ground ball. A quick throw to the play just beat him, and he was tagged out by Mets catcher Travis d'Arnaud, preserving the Mets lead.

Or was he?

The Marlins challenged the call, and the TV audience got to watch almost six minutes of the officiating crew listening for an answer on the phone while we watched the same replay over and over and over again. Five minutes and 45 seconds later, the officials gave the final answer: d'Arnaud's tag had just missed Ichiro on his way to the plate, and the second tag attempt was a heartbeat too late. He was safe, the score was tied (don't worry - there is a happy ending. The Mets scored again and went on to win).

There was some anger from Mets fans over what might be a bad call, some relief that "we" won anyway. What do I think? ANd what does this have to do with a gooseneck microphone? Before I answer, watch the play at full speed. Don't watch the replays. Forget what I just said.

Was he safe or out? The truth is that in real-time it happened so quickly that you could tell me either and I'd believe you. Watch five minutes of instant replays -- and we can still debated it. Perhaps we're a bit more likely to have the right answer.  Either way, however, it is not so egregious an error as to hurt my enjoyment of the game. I'd argue that my enjoyment was hurt more by having to wait for the results. Replay made the game more "fair" but less "fun".

Microphones and Microphones and Microphones
We AV professionals are often in conflict with the interiors part of design teams regarding microphones, speakers, and any other AV elements which might have to be more visible than would be ideal for aesthetics. What makes matters worse is that the best solutions from an audio perspective are often the most problematic aesthetically.  Recently I had a discussion with the manufacturer of a "delegate system" consisting of free-standing little boxes with gooseneck microphones and some simple controls. Their argument is that it made a better solution than a boundary mic or a ceiling mic. I agreed, but pointed out that whenever I propose such a thing in a high-profile boardroom with expensive furniture the architect would most certainly complain. The response:

"I hope you set them straight."

This is a problem some of us in the industry have. Like the well-meaning baseball executives who insist on making sure the calls are right, we can become obsessed with finding the best solutions. At best, this leads to excellent performance. At worst, it creates a kind of tunnel vision in which the enjoyment of a space is harmed by a lack of attention to overall experience (which includes how a space looks).

The truth is that for simple conferencing applications boundary or even ceiling microphones are adequate. They're the experienced umpire's best judgement at game-speed. A 12-inch gooseneck? That's a team in a control room with five minutes to view super-slow-motion from multiple angles.

Last year I posted about a mad-science experiment in which several mics were compared for use with a soft-codec. This is something about which I've been thinking more - especially as expectations have shifted.

Sliding Expectations

Not many years ago, if you said "videoconference" to an executive, they would think of a dedicated conference room, with integrated microphones, a DSP capable of being tuned for the specific room conditions, and possibly acoustic treatments to maximize performance. The idea would be a space built and designed for that function.

Now if you say "videoconfernce" most people will think of the Google Hangouts or Apple Facetime app on their phone. Does a room system need to be better than this to accommodate a dozen or more people? Absolutely. Is the expectation an immersive experience with the best-quality audio and video? Only in the most specialized spaces.

I'm no longer in the business of setting anybody straight; I do educated, I do try to guide clients to the right answer.

What I've learned is that sometimes the right answer is to let the call on the field stand to preserve the flow and experience of the game, even at the expense of some measure of accuracy.

IT's good to be right, but sometimes being right is not enough.

Sometimes it's even wrong. 

Clean Reader, Blasphemy, and the Value of Culture

I wasn't going to say anything about the Clean Reader app. Honestly, I wasn't. Anything that needs saying on the topic has been said, and quite well. Then I ran into this piece, in which Cory Doctorow makes a free-speech argument in favor. To be fair to Doctorow, he does agree with pretty much everybody sane in that he sees Clean Reader as a terrible idea; where he and I part ways is his insistence that the use of such an app doesn't violate authors' rights and that creating tools for creating derivative works by bowldlerizing their work - often in a clumsy and ham-handed manner.

For those who've not heard, Clean Reader is a filtering app for those who like to read books but fear that their heads might explode if they are exposed to profanity. You read that correctly: there are people so afraid of seeing naughty words that they will filter them out of their books. Many authors, of course, are incensed  by what they see as editing of their work without authorization; Clean Reader claims to get around this by not actually altering the stored text but merely filtering what appears on screen. This, to me, is a distinction without a difference; if what appears on-screen is an alteration of the original text, then the app has, in effect, created a derivative work. Living authors holding copyright do have both the legal and moral right to choose how their work is distributed and viewed.  (Doctorow has always taken an extreme and, to my eyes, silly anti-copyright stance. That's a topic for a later discussion).

In what I see as his misguided defense of Clean Reader, Doctorow says something extraordinary: Free Speech isn't just the right to express yourself, it's the right not to listen. To "not listen" in this context is not to simply not read a book which you might find offensive; it's to purchase a tool to alter your perception of the text so as to expunge those things which offend your sensibilities. It violates authorial intent to the point that, should I ever get around to finish writing something, I'd rather my work not be read at all than twisted in such a manner.

The bigger issue lies in the impulse to do things like this in the first place, an impulse which has two troubling aspects: The Right to Not Be Offended and the drive to Protect the Children.

Protecting the Children
My fellow godless New York liberals may laugh at the Clean Reader brigade, especially

Hawthorn's Nursery rhyme book,
edited for content

when it comes to the censoring of body parts ("vagina" is apparently a bad work in CleanReaderland). How many of us, however, would hand our kids a copy of the Chronicles of Narnia rather than, say Pullman's His Dark Materials? How many of us would have our children read from a Bible or Torah or Koran (and I mean read it with an open mind, not as a pretext for mockery or attacks)? How many would seek out - for ourselves or our children - intelligently written work with a viewpoint different than ours?

Make no mistake -Clean Reader is not only very, very easy to mock, but those mocking it are right. That doesn't mean that mockery is the only correct response or that we shouldn't look into a mirror. I'll make a confession myself; I've edited books for content as I read them to my young children. Chloe was a very sensitive small girl, so I'd gloss over really scary parts. There was also one scene - in The Berenstein Bears Bedtime Battle, in which our ursine family was saying prayers before bed. As we discussed before, my family is atheist; we don't do prayers, particularly the sort of explicitly Christian prayer the bears say before bed. So... I would skip the page. It's something one can get away with if before ones kids learn how to read. I'm not in bad company with this; Nathaniel Hawthorne (who may or may not have been the inspiration for our Nate's name, depending on which day you ask me) marked up some stories in a book of fairy-tales as "not to be read to [his daughter] Uma", and excised the worst bits. True story.

How do I feel about that today? I've grown more likely to share things that don't exactly fit our worldview - to an extent. Chloe did read the Narnia books, Christian allegory and all. Today I'm less likely to skip a "say your prayers" part of a story. Why? Because cultures or ideas different than mine shouldn't be painted as "scary" or "other" or as a big mystery. It should just be part of life - albeing different lives than ours.

Not Being Offended - Blasphemy and Trigger Warnings

This is something that's flitted in and out of the news over the past months, particularly with events like the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper in France, Draw Mohammed Day and other such events. My position on this one is complicated; I see no value in deliberately causing offense for its own sake. Cruelty is not fun, nor is it useful social commentary. To deliberately attack for no other reason is not only cruel, it paradoxically cedes control of the conversation to those fundamentalists most focused on avoiding such imagery; drawing Mohammed just because someone told you not to do so is as much putting them in control of your expression as would doing the opposite.

More complicated is the idea of "trigger warnings" for contents which might hurt those who are trauma victims. This is something which certain online communities take quite seriously. Is it wise, or kind to censor - or at least label - depictions of rape, for example, in deference to rape victims who might not be in a proper headspace to view such things? I'd answer "perhaps", but it's clearly more complicated than that. There's plenty of great and quite important art and literature - from the very oldest writings through today - which depict quite painful topics. Should we slap trigger warnings on Shakespeare for violence, sex, and suicide, or - worse - create bowdlerized versions without uncomfortable themes (Disney Shakespeare, perhaps)? I'd say no to both,  as I see more value in art which contains some measure of darkness and of complexity. Yes, I believe in the cultural commons and in the right to create derivative works; in this respect I'm likely with Doctorow in saying that such a thing shouldn't be illegal. I'm also with him in thinking it without serious merit.

Is this smart?

I'll add that simple "search and replace" toys like the CleanReader app are pretty much useless for this; they'll miss, for example, the heavily-implied rape scene in AStreetcar Named Desire. Editting for content is problematic enough; if we must, we should do so mindfully.

The conclusion is the same regardless; creation of little islands within the greater culture in which not only are we not looking at the same thing, we look at ONLY those things which reinforce our worldview. The larger purpose of art - to inform, to challenge, to communicate new ideas - is replaced by literary comfort food, reinforcing the ideas with which we're already comfortable. While that might not be terrible - we all need comfort at times - I'd say that it is not enough. We should seek out ideas which challenge us, even those which offend us. 

Show Don't Tell - The Language of the Story and the RFP

Show don't tell. It is THE quintessential writing advice for good reason. Don't tell us that a character is brave - show them facing a fear. While you're at it, don't tell us they are afraid - show us the quickening pulse, the sweaty palms, the tightness in the belly. Paint a word picture. Avoid "telling" words  such as nice, beautiful, good. Those words don't tell us anything.

I know; I'd promised a technology post, and here I am prattling on about standard, entry-level writing tips. That's because as a consultant someof my biggest contributions are written. Specifications. Narratives. System descriptions. All the details that go into creating an RFP.  While technical writing is in many ways different than creative writing, this one piece of advice holds strongly for both: show, don't tell.

There's a temptation to write a specification in such a way as to make the user feel that they're getting something special - expecially in the more specialty spaces on a larger job. I've seen language such as this:

The auditorium will be served by left and right program speakers, for high-quality stereo audio...

or

Flat-panel displays for high-resolution video playback of multimedia content.

or

Paging speakers for highly intelligible voice reproduction.

Compare those with

 The basement is dark and scary

Absent a definition of "high-quality audio", "High resolution video" or "highly intelligible voice reproduction" there's no objective goal. From a purely functional perspective, those words add nothing to either a contractor's understanding of the project or to the creation of a standard of success. Absent a description of the "scary" basement, you're literally giving the reader nothing but a dark space.

Two things can go wrong with such vague language. First, a contractor looking to cut corners or maximize profit can provide equipment with insufficient capability for the intended use. This can devolve into a fight in which the definition of "high quality" or "high resolution" is disputed. At the very worst, you can get a situation in which a contractor is either unwilling or unable - because their understanding of "high quality" is different than yours - to deliver a solution which is satisfactory to the client.

The other goal accomplished by more precise use of language is the setting of a finish line. There has to be some way for everyone to agree that a project is done. If an end result is described with purely subjective language, one is dependent on the client's subjective impression to agree that a project is successfully complete. Did you write "high-quality audio" in official bid documents? Good job - now you have a client standing in the room saying "it doesn't sound very high quality to me", and you have no way to tell him anything different.

So how do you do it? You fill in the darkness by painting a word picture. The only difference is whether that picture belongs in an art gallery or a set construction documents.

Some things are easy. Paging systems should have an STI (speech transmission index) target. This is an objective measure to which a system can be designed for intelligibility. High quality audio? SPL level, frequency response (+/- n dB over a range of frequencies) and other such objective criteria can give an actual target and actual design parameters. It'll make things easier for everyone.

Furnish paging speakers per contract drawings. Paging system should reproduce sound at a level of 75dB SPL at a height of 4' above finished floor. This system should achieve an STI of no less than 0.65

There are secret parts of the basement where nobody goes. Behind the boiler. Under the oil tank where winedark stains smell of old engines.  In the cracked parts of the foundation where tree trunk-thick waste pipes snake off to the underground. ... A little nook under the workbench, smelling of sawdust and oil layered over damp, earthy secrets. Sometimes, if I lay very quiet, I could hear their whispering. Low, languid, earthynoises, deeper even than my father's bellow but so soft and gentle.

Perhaps not the best descriptive text I've ever written, but it's paints a far better picture than "The basement is dark". So far as the paging spec is concerned, the improvement is clear; we show (using a number or objective measure) rather than tell (using a subjective statement of "quality"). At system close-out, it makes the difference between "the STI level is measured at .45, which does not meet standards" to "it doesn't sound good to me." The problem with the latter is clear: I've seen contractors chasing an elusive "It doesn't sound good to me" far, far too long into what should be simple projects. 

Issues with vague language can linger, and get into a user's head.  

If I wrote:

     We walked into the woods

Do you see this:

     The lantern cast a little pool of light in which they saw only branches and brambles. Dried leaves crunched underfoot as we walked on. This was closer to the nightmare of being lost in the woods, but not too close. The familiar gravel path was nearby. It had to be.

Or this?

     Truth be told, it isn't much of a wood, but there are trees and moonlight here in suburbia, what would have been an enchanted forest populated with dragons, witches, highwaymen when I was a boy. They're nice, straight, tall pine trees, but not connected to the famous pine-barrens. Perhaps they were  some time in the distant past, but now it's just enough to inflate the property value just a bit, and
to keep us from seeing our back-fence neighbors.

It's the same with "good audio"; if you don't show the reader what you want them to see, they'll tell their own story. That might not be the story you wanted to tell, or the story that you wanted to tell. Once the readers have told their own stories in their heads it's very hard to regain control of the narrative.

Does this always work? Are there times when you can't use numbers? Absolutely. Is there room for simile and metaphor? Perhaps. That is another discussion for another day.

Thanks for listening.

Why the Sun Did Not Rise Today

This was going to be an audiovisual post, but sometimes there's an event about which I simply must write. Yesterday was such an event in the world of literature.

I'll start by saying that the death of a celebrity is not something which usually affects me on a personal level; I was sad, but didn't cry over Robin Williams. Same for Leonard Nimoy. I don't feel close enough to them for it to have a visceral impact. That said, I cried when I saw this on Twitter:

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

The End.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

For those who've not read Terry Pratchett (and if you've not you should have), Death is a recurring character in his Discworld series of fantasy books. His dialog is always in all capitals, so this final series of tweets on the occasion of Sir Terry's passing reads as a meeting between the author and his creation as the Reaper takes  his hand and leads him to whatever lies beyond. Yes, I cried over it.

I felt that we already mourned him once when he learned he had a rare form of early-onset alzheimers, but with the books continuing to appear it seemed that he'd be with us always, and cheat death. We know that that isn't the case for anyone. We can, of course, take comfort in the work he left behind. In one sense he'll never truly have left us as long as his work is still to be read. What did we lose - especially those of us who would never meet Sir Terry? I'm reminded of a scene from Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. The personification of dreams (known as Dream) had just died. Cain and Abel (from the Bible. It's THAT kind of book. Also highly, highly recommended) were discussing the funeral with another character:

“Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?""Then what died? who are you mourning?""A point of view."

Isn't that all that ever dies? Someone's unique way of seeing the world? We still have the legacy of Sir Terry's words and ideas. What we don't have is anyone who sees the world exactly as he did.

Who Was Sir Terry?

Pratchett at a convention. You have to love his
self-deprecating sense of humor

He's best known as a humorous fantasy writer, his best known work by far being the Discworld series. I discussed the series overall in my review of what was, tragically, the very last volume in a post here. How sad it makes me feel to have given so poor a review to a master's very final work! The first time I read one of his books was over twenty years ago now, making his a presence through half of my life to date. He was extremely prolific and extremely engaging.

The primary tribute I've seen online has been to share favorite quotes. I'll do the same herein, starting with a bit on economic justice. Neil Gaiman, another terrific British writer, described his friend Pratchett as a very angry man, whose anger fueled a decades-long writing career. Here;s his character, police chief Sam Vimes, on income inequality

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. 
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feed dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and still have wet feet. 
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. "But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feed dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. "

He was also a writer who is very easy to dismiss, as he primarily wrote not just fantasy but comic fantasy. In my eyes, fantasy is important in that it gives us another language to tell truths too big for literal language. In closing, I'll share the quote the activist and writer Steampunk Emma Goldman shared. The scene here is a scrap of dialog between the aforementioned Death and his daughter Susan. They've just saved The Hogfather (a sort of Santa-Claus analog in the Discworld universe) from assassination. Susan had been told that, had the Hogfather died, the sun would not rise the next day.

"Now...tell me..."
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM?
"Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
NO."Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.She turned on him."It's been a long night, Grandfather! I'm tired and I need a bath! I don't need silliness!"THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN."Really? Then what would have happened, pray?A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.They walked in silence for a moment."Ah," said Susan dully. "Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that."I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE."All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need...fantasies to make life bearable."REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."So we can believe the big ones?"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING...YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"

Today many of us feel that the Hogfather has died and that, in place of a glorious sunrise, the clockwork of the world turned in such a way that we'd face a large, burning ball of gas.

Curt Schilling is Not the Victim - the limits of shame in the fight for public civility

First off, I apologize to any of my fans for being away from this space for so long. As you all know, these have been trying times for me and my family; My lovely wife Karine had major back surgery just over a month ago, and is now convalescing in our home on Long Island. It's been a very difficult road in terms of her immediate recovery and hospital stay (including a long stint in the ICU), continued post-surgical pain, and the challenges of caring for two young children with one parent out of commission. I'll thank all of you who have offered kind wishes and who have supported our ongoing fundraiser to help cover expenses (special thanks to Gary Kayye of Ravepubs, Tim Albright of AVNation, and Corey Moss et al of the cAValry Rides show for lending their respective platforms to help spread the word. Thank you, AV friends!). It seems thematically fitting that my return to blogging will touch on the theme of family. Worry not, there will be more to say about the world of AV, fiction, and other thoughts. I'll start, however, with recent events involving former pitcher turned semi-professional loudmouth Curt Schilling.

 

Say what you will about him - we'll never forget Schilling's
performance in the 2004 ALCS.
Image courtesy of CNBC

For those living under a rock, Schilling posted a simple message on Twitter congratulating his daughter for getting into her college of choice where she will pitch on the softball team. The reaction - as it too often is when a woman is involved anywhere on social media - turned misogynistic and nasty including rape threats, reference to very aggressive sex acts, and overall nastiness. Schilling responded on his blog with a rant about civility, about how people need to learn that their actions have consequences, and included the names of some of the worst offenders. Two were students who were promptly suspended for their conduct; one was - in a poetic twist - a ticketseller from Schilling's old rivals, the New York Yankees. They fired him, along with a statement that they have zero tolerance for such conduct.

At a glance, everything is as it should be; a man defended his family from verbal bullying, the bullies paid a price. Nobody innocent was hurt, and we were given an example as to why we need to treat people civilly. The global community shunned these miscreants as a local village would have in times of old. Yet part of me can't help but feel uncomfortable, for a number of reasons.

First and foremost is the emphasis on Curt Schilling. He's famous, his daughter Gabby is not.  Yes, he chose defend his family and to name and shame. What he has not done, as of this writing, is direct any of that attention to those bullying women NOT related to famous baseball players. In his blog post, he said the following:

I mentioned being a Republican, being a Red Sox and all that other stuff. I didn’t insert politics to make a point, I did so to make sure if you read it you knew that I KNEW people hate me for one or more reasons.

[snip]

I look at it like this. If someone walked into your house and punched your daughter square in the face, what would your reaction be? You and I probably are thinking the very same thing. How is that different than what happened to my amazing Daughter?

This, to me, can be read as framing the bullying as a crime against him, Curt Schilling rather than against his daughter Gabby. At best, it puts the focus on him. At worst, this and the mention of Gabby's boyfriend paint bullying of a young woman not as a crime against her, but as a property crime against the men in her life to whom she belongs. Was this Curt's intent? That I can't answer, but even if we give him the benefit of the doubt it's hard to not see that as a message. In the meantime independent computer game developer Zoe Quinn continues to receive rape and death threats, Anita Sarkeesian is forced to cancel a speaking engagement due to death threats, Brianna Wu faces literally two years of harassment and threats from a man who later claims that it was some kind of elaborate performance art (and no, I'm not making that up. I wish I were). What makes the latter cases different? Wu and Sarkeesian and Quinn don't have powerful men to speak on their behalf; All they have are their own voices against the small, pitiful, but loud "GamerGate" movement dedicated to attacking outspoken women under the guise of "ethics in video game journalism". Their own voices aren't enough to have us listen.

That brings the bigger problem; there is no systemic way to deal with things like this. "Name and shame"  favours the loudest voices, those who already have power. Gabby Schilling's harassers were punished not because of what they said, but because of who their victim's family was. Schilling is not only famous and wealthy, he's a loud, polarizing figure who knows how to get our attention. A similar attack on, say, my family would get zero public attention. I'm one hundred percent in favor of platforms such as Twitter allowing anonymity; there are many legitimate activists and members of marginalized groups who depend on it. That said, they need to take a more active role in stopping this kind of behavior. I'm not such a free speech fetishist that I'll accept harassment as the price of doing business.

Even those of us who dislike Curt Schilling will fight for his daughter. We feel as if we know him and, by extension, her. Sure, he's the crazy uncle with reprehensible political views and a shaky grasp - at best - of science. That doesn't make him any less OUR crazy uncle with reprehensible ideas.
 

Finally, there's the issue that absent legal remedies we've resorted to the extralegal weapon of shaming. This is open to all kinds of abuse, both intentional and subconscious. Consider the following thought questions:

1. Is it likely that the same swift response would meet a victim of color?
2. Is the response equal across the board, or is it arbitrary?
3. One harasser lost a fairly low-paying entry-level job. Should a repercussion to such things be an inability to work? If so, how is he expected to feed himself?
4. One harasser was suspended from college. Is an inability to get an education a reasonable repercussion? How will this benefit society?
5. How does your response to Item 4 blesh with the fact that prisons often offer educational programs to inmates? Could this be seen as worse than a prison sentence, for either the harassers or for society?

I won't lie, I'm a primate just like you are (I assume all of my readers are primates. Apologies to any uplifted dolphins reading this on waterproof smartphones). My first reaction was satisfaction that justice was done; someone did something bad, and we hurt them. Stepping far enough back, I don't see this as a solution. I see one very powerful man throwing around his muscle against some nobodies without moving to take any steps to solve the bigger issues. I see the community reading about this brushing its collective hands together, muttering to itself "good job" while higher levels of more persistent harassment continue. I see an emotional response, not a logical one. Judicial approaches have a fixed penalty, standards of proof, and - at best - a path to post-penalty rehabilitation and reintroduction to society. This kind of ad hoc shaming has none of that. Can we do better? I want to believe that we can.

As always, thanks for listening. I'll be back soon with something on the world of audiovisual technology.