Starbucks Via

Another sign of the economic times? Starbucks is now selling instant coffee.

Here's a review by the folks at the Chicago Tribune:

Instant reaction to Starbucks' Via Ready Brew: How does it actually taste?

The cellphone, navigating our lives

John Markoff offers a terrific intro in yesterday's New York Times ("The cellphone, navigating our lives"): "The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information."

In his piece, Markoff proposes that the metaphor of the map is replacing the metaphor of the office file as a means to understanding our relationship to information. To illustrate, the author discusses Google's new Latitude location-orientation application. With this app, the information aggregator will be able to sift through more and more content with each use of a mobile phone to relate ourselves to places in the world.

Moreover, according to Markoff, "a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera." Markoff cites M:Metrics research to state that only ten percent U.S. mobile phone users use the map features on their phones. But that number is growing.

I find this particularly interesting given the relationship of our uses of technology to the development of our brains. While a cause-effect question remains, I am intrigued by Markoff's proposal that our turning over to machines the mapping that we typically do in our brains (as we have abandoned so many of our other memory functions) may produce profound effects. A snip:

“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”

Read the entire article: The cellphone, navigating our lives

Almost There

In the next week, I hope, City Ubiquitous will be available on Amazon.

This will be the end of one phrase, researching, writing, and getting the book to market, and the beginning of the next: marketing the book.

For many academics, the notion that one would "sell" ideas is an anathema, at least we perform it to be. As Stanley Fish has described in recent pieces in The New York Times, many members of the professorate fantasize of a world in which ideas are unconstrained by such pedestrian concerns as popular opinion and monetary value. Information, and how we produce it, should be free.

To be fair, a great many of these folks manage to do just fine for themselves, financially. But like well applied makeup, it is rude to ask how the illusion is crafted.

Me, I have no problem admitting that I've worked more than a decade on my articulation of omnitopia (certainly, not the only one around), and that I seek at least some modest compensation for all that time and labor. In short, I'm happy to enter the marketplace of ideas with a book to sell.

So I await the news that Amazon has placed City Ubiquitous on its virtual bookshelves. And I look forward to whatever happens next.

How to Argue Like Jesus - Book Review

If you speak to do well - but also to do right - Joe Carter and John Coleman's How to Argue Like Jesus is a worthy addition to your library. I say this not only as an occasional instructor of public speaking classes but also as an agnostic who, nonetheless, is impressed with the message contained in this book.

The authors lay out an impressive goal: to employ an Aristotelian framework that unpacks the rhetorical strategies of Jesus (even as Jesus offers a means to illuminate Aristotle's notions of ethos, pathos, and logos). Given my interest in logos, I am particularly drawn to the reminder that, "While many modern anti-thesists argue for the irrationality of religion, Jesus is an exemplar of reason, rationality, and logic" (p. 44). The authors then expand their gaze to explore Jesus' use of imagery, his strategies for message dissemination, and the ways in which his rhetorical principles may be applied to contemporary speaking challenges.

This is, after all, a practical book. The authors expertly shift from historical context to rhetorical analysis to personal application, demonstrating how even complex concepts and strategies may be employed in familial, academic, and corporate environments. Notable contributions include a rich description of argumentative strategies and a section exploring the five C's of effective parables that will prove useful to those who would motivate people in both businesses and places of worship (pp. 94-95) -- though I would add that the bright line between grows ever more dim.

Perhaps the most fascinating component of this book appears (at first) to be its least rhetorical: a discussion of the cellular process or organization growth and maintenance. The authors state, "So Christ commanded his disciples not only to stick together but to disperse" (p. 119). From this point, the authors offer an insightful discussion of the role of communication in a world of increasingly detached human relationships.

While written as a textbook - with a list of key terms, questions for consideration, and even footnotes - How to Argue Like Jesus is designed for a "lay audience." It is not for scholars or would-be scholars; it is for those who simply wish to be more effective speakers. The authors wisely write in a manner that is not pedantic but is rather practical, direct, and engaging.

I would further add that How to Argue Like Jesus may be termed a sort of ministry for folks like me who have not thought carefully about the various lessons, warnings, and opportunities offered by Christ but, in studying his words from a technical perspective, gain some sense of the deeper purpose of the work. As such, I can highly recommend this book.

Amazon link: How to Argue Like Jesus

What Age is Starbucks America?

The folks at the Pew Research Center have come up with an oddly compelling statistic about the relative cultural placement of Starbucks and McDonald's.

When asking whether Americans prefer living in a place with more of one chain over the other, Pew reports that 43 percent prefer to live in a world of Happy Meals while 35 percent prefer the land of ventis and scones.

Of course, age proved to be a factor. Younger people trend toward cappucinos while older folks maintain their love of Big Macs.

Adweek has details: Starbucks America vs. McDonald's America

Yahoo Chat

Have you been on Yahoo chat recently?

I haven't been in a chatroom in maybe 15 years. But I started messing around in a few chatspaces in the past couple days.

Wow. Sad. So very sad.

First - and this is hardly news to most folks, but it surprised me - most of the "people" participating are 'bots. I'm not talking about Turing Test experiments. No, just random assortments of come-on lines designed to get you to enter a private chat space. Then, the hook:

"Wanna come [or some variation] to my website? My cam is switched on!"

Uh huh. The URLs to which these invites lead are crazy quilt addresses linking to God knows where.

Occasionally real people troll the sites too, seemingly never choosing to talk about the ostensible purpose of the chatroom (parenting, computers, whatever). Mostly it's folks yelling into the void: "Are there any humans here?" Sometimes its just an assemblage of goofy oddball pranks (eg., "I put on my robe and wizard hat"). I played along, too. But it got boring real fast.

Amid all the invitations for porn, viewing Yahoo chat is kind of like checking my old Yahoo mail account. Except that it scrolls on its own.

Yeah. I don't think I'll be back.

Anaesthetized Impersons

E. E. Cummings once described a world of “anaesthetized impersons,” which I imagine to be people who have become strangers to their environments and to each other. When we interact with others according to the rules of the built environment or the practices of social norms or the uniforms we wear, we become impersons, and so do they: not quite dead but, rather, anesthetized.

The cop who pulls you over for a traffic infraction must know your name and other personal information. But she should not, cannot, care to learn your personal story. Doing so would invite the specter of favoritism, corruption, even when faced with the most dire circumstances. For example, were she to ask your opinion of the previous evening's presidential debate while writing your speeding ticket, an essential line between personal and social life would be breached, perhaps with fearful consequences.

After all, in the matrix of bureaucracy, even the most humanistic among us wisely fear the administration of power that claims to know our souls, particularly when the relationship can never be reciprocal. One can hardly detach these relationships from the practices of power, most obviously of class.

Indeed, one might consider the etymological connection between the architectural "manor" and the social practice of "manners." In both cases, one must "know one's place." The psychic burden of such inequity can be too heavy to bear. Better to sleepwalk through our interactions with impersons, to not look to deeply into our own lives when acting as impersons ourselves.