De File

Since my parents moved out to Tucson in October, 2010, the rhythm of my days has changed rather drastically. At first, overloaded as I was that fall, I only stopped by a few times throughout the week. Most of my helping out consisted of running errands. But after my mother had to be hospitalized with a chronic urinary tract infection which had severely weakened her, I found myself having to go over to my parents' apartment more in order to keep my dad company.

Once my mother had returned, it became clear that my father's own increasing frailty from a physical standpoint would require that I help him get my mother to bed several nights each week. That shift put a lot of stress on my domestic situation, since it meant that my daughter either had to spend a good deal of time home alone -- her mother was often away evenings -- or accompany me to my parents' place. At first she often chose the latter option, but gradually became more comfortable on her own. As a twelve-year-old, she had reached an age when she was ready for the greater sense of autonomy.

From her perspective, what started out a source of stress has ended up being one of relief. No matter how much she loves her parents, she needed alone time. Most teenagers-to-be get that by spending lots of time in their rooms or out of the house with friends. Not Skylar, though. Her favorite alone time turned out to be the sort that comes when she can be in the biggest room of the house without the possibility of parental intrusion. Frequently she would use her hour or so of truly free time to bounce on her trampoline to her favorite songs, an elementary-school activity that she thankfully rediscovered in middle school, since she was at that delicate stage of development when the path to fitness diverges rather dramatically from the path of sedentary pursuits.

Now, as I wrote here a few days ago, she has significantly upped the exercise ante, literally spending hours each day engaged in physical activity. Bouncing on her trampoline has gone from being her only significant form of aerobics to a comfort pastime she indulges when she is feeling agitated or wants to take a break from what she deems "real" exercise. There are many reasons to applaud this metamorphosis, first and foremost the fact that the habits she is hardening now will stay with her throughout her adult life, at least to a degree. But it has also complicated her parents' life a good deal, since the activities she prefers now -- running on the treadmill at the gym, lifting weights, swimming and bicycling -- are all ones that require one of us to either drive or accompany her. (I'm sure she would love the opportunity to bike or jog by herself, but there are too many potential dangers for us to permit that yet.)

What this means in practical terms on my end is that much of the time that I'm not spending at my parents' place -- roughly five hours a day, seven days a week -- is now devoted to Skylar's fitness regimen. I love the quality one-on-one time this carves out for us, as does her mother, who takes her to the gym all the time now. But the loss of so many hours is also taxing. I have several important writing projects underway, as well as the seemingly endless task of reorganizing the house, garage and storage space, yet find myself with very few uninterrupted stretches in which to build up the momentum I need to make serious progress. Indeed, just writing this entry, which I have been doing at my parents' apartment while my mom is eating or in the bathroom, has taken me two weeks of five-minutes-here, five-minutes-there sit downs with the laptop.

I mention all this not to complain -- I have so much to be grateful for, despite the trials and tribulations of the past half decade -- but to provide an explanation for my absence from Live Journal since early 2011, one which I am making a concerted effort to address right now. Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will know that I have continued to post regularly there during the past year and a half. My reasons for doing so, though, have less to do with a preference for that particular social network than the simple fact that it's the only one that I can use without too much trouble on my phone, a benighted Blackberry -- Blackberries, to be specific, since I'm currently on my third replacement device -- that makes Web-based applications into sheer torture. If there were an app that worked well for LJ on my phone -- or for Google+, for that matter -- I would have been spreading myself around a lot more than I have.

Here's a headline that money can't buy: "Google now lets you target ads at yourself." As the article goes on to explain, Google is trying to refine the original principle of its advertising strategy, which serves up ads as a response to what you look for or, on Gmail, write about, by giving consumers the power to participate actively in the process:

Not only will Google now target ads at you based on your interest, but it will also let you target yourself. Anyone can go to Google’s Ad Preferences Manager and see exactly how Google is categorizing their interests. (Most people will probably see nothing right now, since this program is only being rolled out on a test basis and will gradually expand). Now, here’s the really smart part: Google lets you add or remove any interest. In effect, it is inviting you to declare what kind of ads you wan to see. You can also opt out of the program completely.

While most people will probably never bother to tweak their ad preferences or even be aware that they can, this represents an important new precedent in online advertising. Why should the ad networks be the only ones who can determine how to target ads at consumers? Why not let the consumers self-target if they care to do so?

Google knows that its interest-based targeting algorithms need a lot of work. Even if it can get just a small percentage of people to correct the algorithm, that data theoretically could be applied to other people with similar browsing patterns. Google gets to say that it is giving users more privacy and control, while collecting really valuable data that will help make its targeting more effective. In the online ad game, whoever can target the best can charge the most.

In other words, instead of fearing the impulse to opt out of advertising, as television networks have, Google has found a way to transform that preference into useful demographic data that pertains not only to the person exercising her or his choice but to many others who fail to do so, either because they don't care or don't know how. That makes sense, from a marketing standpoint, and is another indication why Google is one of the corporations likely to emerge from the collapse of the global financial system in a position of dominance.

Yet the implications for this approach from the standpoint of cultural theory are disturbing. From my perspective, the insidiousness of this form of data collection inheres, not only in the use of active participants' information on those who remain passive, but in the psychological impact the distinction between these categories has for those who believe that they have a right to control the marketing that confronts them. If the people who take charge of the stream of advertising directed at them on Google perceive themselves as evading manipulation in that context, they are more likely, I'd argue, to transpose this perception to other contexts. The most sweeping trend in contemporary consumer society, exemplified by the culture that has developed around the iPod, uses the specter of standardization à la Fordism to advance the cause of customization, even as the "right" to customize becomes the vehicle for new forms of standardization.

If you are interested in the intersection of technology and gender or just want to hear out some of the people I respect most in the world, you should check out the reading that charliegrrrl, Annalee and two of their contributors to She's Such a Geek gave at Google headquarters:

Watch on YouTube

I like this format. It makes YouTube useful for something other than nostalgic chills and cheap thrills. More personally, it's great to be able to hear voices I know so well in this context. You can get the book, which is full of great stuff, here.

I'm so tense -- the respirator is about to be removed -- that I've just been sorting piles in the garage and refreshing the page for the San Francisco Chronicle's live blogging from Macworld. How pathetic is that? Worse still, despite the looming crisis of Nachträglichkeit and the fact that I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs is not a pleasant person to be around, I'm captivated by his performance, even when it's relayed secondhand. The fact that he can get the heads of Google and Yahoo on stage together to celebrate his latest product is kind of gross, further confirmation that Apple has become about as alternative as, well, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and nevertheless fuel for the fires of desire. I do want a phone that does everything. I do. I do.

I'm sitting in one of those rooms that some airports now have in which travelers can use an internet connection, comfortable chair, and numerous outlets for recharging their technological devices. It also has a big flat-panel screen tuned to CNN. While I was reading a little while ago, I kept looking up to meet the eyes of the people across the room, who were alternating between staring at their computers or books and paying attention to the news. Last night I used the fitness center at our hotel and found my eyes roving from one flat-panel to another. At one point I was on the treadmill listening to South Park on the headphones attached to the screen in front of me and looking over at the news on the one to my left and the late-night talk show on the one to my right. Even the hotel lobby was a multimedia experience, with 40 inches of ESPN distracting me as I read my e-mail and downloaded photos from camera to laptop. None of this is particularly surprising, but it still feels like the new world so sensuously predicted in the science-fiction novels and films of the previous two decades is finally here. It's becoming harder and harder to tune out the ambient media of our world. And I'm not sure that I mind. Even though I sometimes crave a monastic existence, I still find myself in places like this, demonstrating my willingness to participate in a culture that puts access before privacy.

I've been spending the last few days -- when not teaching, writing, parenting cooking, doing dishes, or being ill -- copying the contents of my 3.5" disks onto the hard drive of my Power Mac 8600.

Tonight I plugged that aging beast into the prim 15" Gateway flat-panel Kim just got to use with the Windows machine she's bringing home for work. It seemed wrong, somehow, even though the results were satisfactory. Here I am, typing away in front of a Mitsubishi CRT on the G4-Dual 867, wasting all that electricity and suffering flicker, when the Clinton-era machine in the other room is conserving, unwavering.

[NEWS ALERT: The late Clinton-era ZIP disk from Kim's dad is now behaving strangely as I write this, whirring and blinking.]

My sense of what is and isn't "appropriate" for a particular computer is only magnified by the exercise of copying old Word Perfect files taken originally from my Windows-deprived 386 clone or, in some cases, First Word files -- not that they are readable, exactly -- from my Atari 1040ST onto the hard drive of the 8600, so I can later transport the worthy ones to this George W. Bush-era computer for a purpose yet to be determined, most likely blogging.

There's something strange about opening a file from 1993 in 2004, precisely because eleven years doesn't feel quite that long ago in other arenas of daily existence. My students still listen to Nirvana and Pavement, the way I listened to Zeppelin in the 80s. NCAA men's basketball still looks a good deal like it did in 1993. And, from the standpoint of food culture, Tucson has only recently arrived in the place that the hipper portions of the Bay Area achieved in the early 1990s. But a file from back then, saved onto a computer where the mouse was still an accessory? It feels like entering King Tut's tomb.