I Chose the Wrong Picture

For bleeding hearts like me Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally on the Mall on Saturday seemed both significant and disturbing. I've found it hard to get my thoughts together.

First of all this picture doesn't fit the topic at all. I thought to use this photograph from a KKK march and rally in Washington D.C. in August of 1925. That photo is from a really cool Web site about American history, The Authentic History Center which is a broad collection of primary sources from American popular culture. The problem is a photograph of the KKK is unnecessarily inflammatory and sheds more heat than light.

The only pictures I have on my new computer are ones I've downloaded just to have something to play around with the graphics applications. I got the photo posted here from an email from a Yahoo Group. There wasn't any comment or credit with the photo, but I copied it because I've got a soft spot for blaxploitation films. Back as a freshman at university in the 1970's I didn't have much to do on Friday and Saturday nights and little money too. The Black Student Association showed blaxplotation films for free. These weren't first-run screenings and I don't remember many white students in attendance. A big part of the the fun was audience interaction with the movies. It's incredible looking back that I never chatted anyone up at these screenings, still they were very much fun.

Going from vague memories of the blaxplotation genre I think the picture is of Richard Roundtree who starred in Shaft. I'm not sure though as I searched images and didn't see any of him with the same hair. I'm lost as far as who the woman in the photo might be. I looked around a bit and thought that it might be Camille Yarbrough who was also in the movie Shaft. But the photo certainly isn't from Shaft, and I don't think it is Camille Yarbrough in the photo, nevertheless Camille Yarbrough is very cool.

Meanwhile I've been playing around with the music player in Ubuntu which is called Rhythm Box. Curious about the features for buying music, and probably with the photo in mind, I downloaded Just a Band's albulm 82 without a hitch. I first heard of Just a Band from mention by Kenyan blogger Njorge Matathia. I really liked the songs and the whole DIY aesthetic of the band. So when early this spring their video Makmende Amerudi! became a huge Internet meme I was delighted. If you missed it the video really is worth watching.

All of this is quite far afield from Beck's “Restoring Honor” rally, except that it made me think of various online conversations I've had with African friends where religion comes up. I'm not religious and some of these conversations involve encouraging me to “repent” of my irreligion. Some of my interlocutors are “progressive” politically, so when they speak glowingly of people on the far-right of the political spectrum here in the USA creates cognitive dissonance in me.

I'm not clear on The 27th Comrade's politics. I've been puzzling about that since reading his old blog, Communist Socks And Boots. What is clear is that intellectual rigor matters to Comrade 27. It's also fair to say that Comrade 27 doesn't hesitate to point out injustice, inconsistency and stupidity, even when doing so is annoying. I somewhat suspect he likes being annoying. Some of the links he's posted at the confluence of religion and far-right politics have succeed in annoying me. Still, I value his engaging me online very much.

The alignment of some Africans I've met online with an interpretation of Christianity, the attendant celebrities of it and the hard-right politics that seems to follow gives me pause. It's given me a different lens to look at the Tea Party and Glenn Beck's rally through. From my ordinary frame the politics of the Tea Party screams racism, and the religious rhetoric sounds pretense. The irony is that from African friends I'm able to take a second look at the mindset of some of my fellow Americans.

I choose the wrong picture to illustrate anything about Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally. The rally seems quite important still and I'll try to get some thoughts together about it for future posts.

I think at Christmas time I got a DVD of Shaft in the dollar bin and gave it to a friend as a present. I'm going to try to watch it as thinking about it now makes me think it a much more subtle film than I'd remembered.

Customer Service Update

Having whined about System76 customer service yesterday, I thought I'd better say that I was happy with it today. One aspect of using Ubuntu is having to think a bit more adventurously. For many that seems a great advantage while for others it seems a pain in the neck. I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle. I always am the last one to jump into cold water, but then love the plunge.

Music Set

System76 did return my email Monday afternoon. The email didn't get me any closer to solving my problem with a mic and headset, so I asked more questions. I will await further response.

I really have no idea to what extent System76 actually is a customer relations company. They may actually put some parts together for their product line up. My impression from their online pages is that the business would be classified primarily in the customer service bundle of business operations.

Certainly I'm pretty naive about all things computer. Part of having a Linux operating system is figuring out how to do stuff with the help of other users. I think that's a great thing, but can be intimidating. I looked over the System76 followers at Twitter and noticed there was only about one woman per page listed. I also noticed that over half the male followers have beards.

LinuxChix is an organization formed by women in the Linux community in 1999 with two guiding rules: Be polite. Be helpful. Surely sexism is a part of reason that LinuxChix is needed. But some of the problem is just that computers depend on computer science, something too few of us know anything about. Sometimes clear answers in jargon are mistaken for rudeness.

In most cases it seems that computers operating Linux are the obvious choice for educational settings. I'm in contact with some small organizations in Uganda and with some of the issues that have come up with computers running Windows, it would seem a good choice there too. I'm keen to become at least a little competent because I'm interested in education and service organization where Linux and open source software make a lot of sense.

System76 states that they want to serve the educational market. I think that's very smart and very much needed. That Linux can seem intimidating looms large as a hurdle to overcome for greater adoption in educational settings. Clearly school librarians and other IT specialists play a big role. But simply having more teachers choosing computers running Linux will make a big difference.

I want to be happy with my choice of computer. Right now I can't figure out why my mic or headset for Skype calls don't work. In order to provide support System76 needs to know what the computer is. All their documents say to click on the System76 Driver to find this information. When I did that I get a message that the System76 Driver is unsupported and instructs me to report the bug. In my email response the sales representative told me "that's normal." In his email there was nothing responsive to the issue that I can't get the mic or headset to work.

I bought a computer running Ubuntu because I believe in the significance of open source software. System76's aim to sell computers in the education market is something I'm aligned with; I want to see more teachers and students using Linux. The only possible reason my personal experience is the least bit interesting is how it relates to the broader adoption of open source software. It's a case of "if I can do it anyone can." The point is, I'm not interested in making System76 look bad, rather curious whether a company like System76 can make an average customer like me think Linux is a reasonable choice.

I'll give System76 one point for responding within a working day to my email. Since the response didn't address the problem, no more points. I feel like subtracting a half point for calling a system message to report a bug "normal," but I won't. So a 1 on a 1-5 customer satisfaction scale so far.

Looking around the various software on computer I turned my attention to music. I rarely listen to music on my computer, so I'm rather behind the times when it comes to all the stuff one can do with music. I did have iTunes installed on my old computer, so I wanted to try out the Rhythmbox music player installed. It's easy, even I can figure it out. I'm not so sure about the music store yet, mostly because I'm saving my pennies.

All that put music on my mind. I went up to my house and sat among my meager cassette and CD collection. I still like to make mix-tapes. Who will listen to mix tapes nowadays? The other day I had listened to an old mix tape a friend had made long ago and enjoyed it so much. So I looked up at my tapes and started pulling some down to listen to various cuts. The tapes are from a certain time in my life, something like 20 years ago. I had a blast listening.

I started out with "Carmelita" a song Warren Zevon wrote, but the rendition I played wasn't Zevon's but Dwight Yoakum on vocals and Flaco Jimenez playing accordion. The next song I played was Rodney Crowell singing John Hiatt's "She Loves the Jerk." A theme seemed to be emerging: Life is hard and love hurts. I'll list the songs I listened to at the end of this post. But before I do I'll go right to the last song I played before bed.

It was "Set" by Youssou N'Dour. I was blown away not having heard it for years. I opened the liner notes and read the English translation of the lyrics:

Set (Clean)

Have a clearmind
Be pure in your heart
Be sure in your actions
One day all the world's musicians will meet
Music has no frontiers

One day the Americans
Will find a new vision,
And the Russians too
Will see life in a different way
For there are too many weapons
And war is terrible

I have a vision of all Africa
Being united one day

Give me your hand
Give me one chance to know
What do you think,
For the future?

The young people are crying
Because the older ones are frightening them
That's what makes me sad
They are crying because
They have no hope

Gulp, I'm going to listen to my old tapes some more. Who knows maybe I'll even figure out how to put some of my old music on my computer.

Here's the song list:

Carmelita - Dwight Yoakam
She Loves the Jerk - Rodney Crowell
Holding Back the Tears - K.D. Lang
I Want Your Love - Chris Isaak
You - Maxi Priest
Belefonte - Joyce (Moreno)
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - Al Green
I Can't Get Next to You - Al Green
You've Got Me - Etta James
Got You On His Mind - The Subdudes
Set- Youssou N'Dour

Photo credit: Henryk Kotowski Creative Commons cc Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

New Computer

Early in June my computer was destroyed by a lightning strike. We're up on a hill and the place seems a lightning attractor. Generally the electric grid is well grounded as is our household electric system, but the grounding of the telephone system seems less so. Following instructions my DSL modem was connected directly to the computer rather than through my surge protection. This is not the first computer I've lost by errant electricity over the telephone lines. In fact, the computer lost was a 10-year old Dell Desktop running XP that a friend gave to me to replace the computer previous to it lost in just the same way, which had replaced another lost in a lightening strike. I will add that all of these computers were used longer than what many people consider the useful life of a computer, something around three years.

A dear niece got married here at Thistlemoor in late June, so I was panicked by not having a computer to coordinate with all the out of town guests. A friend lent me a Dell Mini NetBook computer which was a great help. Also knowing that young people would bring their computers and that the World Cup games would be going on I finally got a wireless router for the house. This has the added advantage that my new computer isn't plugged in directly to the phone lines which I hope will prevent lightning from destroying another computer.

The Dell Mini uses an Ubuntu operating system. I had often thought that I should be running Linux, but I was afraid of it because I'm not very technologically adept. But using the Mini was easy. I really liked that it booted in seconds, quite a contrast to my ponderous XP machine. Writing on the Mini was a bit hard. I finally did adapt to the small keyboard, but I found that I too often accidentally closed windows and couldn't figure out what I was doing. It's very frustrating to loose writing, so I just didn't blog.

I think NetBooks are very cool computers. My friend is going to allow me to buy the NetBook from him. I'm happy about that because it makes it easy to share the Internet with my father. I have found Readability a great tool. Just clicking on a bookmarklet turns a Web page into a more readable page. It's great for the small screen of the Mini and it's great for my father who is not accustomed to the Internet because it removes the clutter from the page. I'm looking forward to having both a DeskTop computer and a NetBook.

Thinking about getting a new computer, something that immediately came to mind is computers are for rich people. I needed something inexpensive. I was impressed by how good the Mini was with its Atom processor, so I looked at Atom desktops which are often called "NetTops." I bought a Meerkat Ion NetTop from System76. I wish now that I had added at least more memory when I ordered it, but money was tight.

Decision making is odd. I saw the Meerkat Ion early on in my search of possible alternatives and thought it very good. I later discovered a computer by Zotac which is very similar to the Meerkat Ion for essentially half the price. I decided against buying that because I had to install an operating system on it and I feel tech-challenged. Part of the selling points of the System76 computers is their customer support. I'll discover if System76 customer support is actually worth anything more than frustration because it appears the machine System76 shipped to me is not configured correctly.

The invaluable Dave Winer posted recently Throwing out software that works. Among the topics in that piece is how Apple's IPad is setting back the development of NetBook computers and the role that corporate filters play in preventing users from getting the products they really want. I wanted my new computer to have Linux installed and I was surprised to discover how hard it is to buy a computer without Microsoft software installed here in the USA. I found this especially odd considering how excellent Ubuntu on the Dell Mini is. I understand that neither Microsoft nor Apple is happy about Linux, but I think that the difficulty of buying a computer without Windows7 installed really has more to do with suppressing NetBooks than Linux.

One option of a place to buy a computer available to me is Best Buy. I had a very unpleasant run in with a salesman there a few years back when buying a computer monitor that cost less than $100. The argument was over my reluctance to pay over $40 for an extended warranty for it. The clerk just wouldn't let the subject go, and all in the rude tone common among those who fancy themselves as geeks. It's one thing to say how great you are, but quite another to imply or say outright that the other is not so great. Online I've read many horror stories about the dealing with Best Buy which have added to my prejudice against the store. I was really pissed off in reading Microsoft trains "Linux assassins". There are many interests who benefit from keeping inexpensive computers rare. I can't quite put my finger on why I'm so irritated by the anti-Linux learning module Microsoft crafted for Best Buy sales associates, but it's a safe bet I won't set foot in a Best Buy store ever again.

The Meerkat Ion is manufactured by AOpen a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The unit itself appears to be made in mainland China. It wouldn't surprise me one bit that System76 purchases AOpen computers through at least one middle man between it and AOpen. Anyhow computers in their line up are made by various manufacturers, so the value System76 adds is not in design and manufacturing but in the customer relationship end of things.

Business consultant Umair Haque talks about thin value, that is profit which leaves "others worse off, or, at best, no one better off." Thin value is possible by marginal profits from the marginal losses of others. What Haque advises that businesses instead of being concerned with thin value that they turn their attention to the creation of meaningful value, so-called thick value, that is, sustainable and meaningful value. In looking at System76 it's clear the company is trying to do well by creating thick value for customers. Linux and open source software in general is a good example of thick value and System76 sells computers only with Linux installed. Providing customer service through among other means at Ubuntu Forums. The company is also active on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

With so much of their business out in public view most of what I've seen about System76's customer support is positive. But I also note customers complaints that they don't always respond to email. The system shipped to me has problems related to System76 Drivers not being properly installed, so I wrote them an email rather than address the issue at Ubuntu Forums. I regret that the computer wasn't sent to me in working order, but am quite interested to see how System76 responds.

The last computer I bought--the one before the cast-off Dell a friend gave to me--was purchased at CompUSA. A month or so after purchasing it the computer developed a hardware problem. I took it into the store only to get a harangue that it was a virus and not a hardware problem. I was pretty sure it wasn't a virus because in setting the computer up fresh out of the box it was infected with a worm which took me on a long slog to remove it and then to learn how to secure my computer. After keeping the computer for a week they called me to pick it up. The hardware problem had not been fixed. I took it back again and with much grumbling they took it back. It didn't work any better the next time I brought it home, so on the third time they sent the computer back to the manufacturer to be fixed. I was without a computer for about a month. That's bad enough, but how I was treated was the most discouraging part. Indeed all the incentives for business is thin value. I was happy that the repairs were made under warranty and without additional cost, but the trips to and fro were not cost free to me.

System76 doing better than CompUSA is a pretty low bar, but here's hoping they make that leap. Of course I would like the response to be much better than that. Clearly I've got a vested interest here, but I've got an interest in a detached sort of way too. The question is whether System76 walks the walk of creating thick value for their customers or merely talks the talk.

I discovered that I miss blogging. I can't imagine that anyone missed my blogging, it's just something that adds to my life. Still I hope that with a new computer, and especially that it runs Linux that I'll become more computer literate. This blog and a few others I have need some attention to make the more accessible if anyone stumbles upon them. It's nice to be back and posting.

Photo credit: System76

Materialism

It's spring here at Thistlemoor where I live. Last Friday was sunny and warm but thunderstorms arrived in the evening, so Saturday was rainy, cold and very windy. The wind took down a Horse Chestnut tree Aesculus hippocastanum. This species is native to Europe but there are several species native to this region and we tend to call them Buckeye trees. The tree has suffered from some sort of canker disease killing one half of it's split trunk. I knew the tree was unstable, but resisted cutting it down because I love the candlestick blossoms so. The tree in full bloom on the ground was quite a finale! The canker disease has become widespread in Europe. It's quite worrisome that so many of our fine tree suffer so many diseases.

Sunday night we had a hard frost. The date of the late frosts isn't unusual, but it does seem that plants are further along than the used to be when the frosts come. Last year frost killed the Mulberry leave for the first time I remember, and Sunday's frost did it again. I notice dark leaves of frost damage all around, but as it always is spring is an explosion of growth.

My niece is planning a wedding here in June. I'm trying to do my spring planting, but there are always so many things to do in between the rains. The grass grows so fast and keeping it mown takes time away from the planting. There always seems such urgency this time of year.

In my last post I thought to write a post about how artist and creative types can make a living in these times of the Internet. It's a pregnant subject, but despite thinking about it quite a lot and collecting a list of links, I don't have much to offer on the subject.

The frequent complaint about my writing is that I'm too prolix. This blog has so little traffic that hardly matters here, except for the realization that it gets some traffic. Recently at a social network site I frequent a fellow from Kenya complained about the length of my post saying that it costs a lot of money to access the Internet there. The thread in question was a highly speculative topic on the nature of causes and lost causes. My post at slightly over 600 words didn't seem that damn long. But as this social network has few participants the stinging realization was that nobody was interested in what I had to say--lol.

A somewhat new arrival on the Ugandan blog scene is Freethought Kampala. I love the blog, it's thoughtful and very well done. Soon after Freethought Kampala was inaugurated the 27th Comrade arrived in the comments to contest mindless atheism. I have an enormous affection for the 27th Comrade, high among the reasons is he reads my posts. The emergence of Ugandan blogs is something I've watched with interest. From the beginning the 27th Comrade has been a frequent commenter and linker to the blogs. He's been a consistent booster but he's not afraid of being contentious. I'm not sure what got him banned from Freethought Kampala, whether it was the contentiousness of his comments or simply the length of them.

Anyhow, back around the beginning of May James Onen had a post at Freethinker Kampala, My Article In The Daily Monitor Newspaper which I wanted to comment on. But having been recently chastised about the length of my posts, I thought it better to make my comments on a post here. I then set about avoiding doing that post. Meanwhile the 27th Comrade and I have been arguing back and forth at his blog over posts that are essentially extensions of the debate begun at Freethinker Kampala.

The 27th Comrade's posts are very much worth reading, but it takes some time to do so, not just because of their length but the dept of thought in them. I certainly am not sufficiently educated in philosophy to really do his ideas justice in my comments, but when has my ignorance ever prevented me from talking? Nevertheless, in our back and forth, especially on this post it seemed only fair for me to try to develop some of my thoughts here instead of in his comments. And that prospect reminded me of the comments I wanted to make in re James Onen's post.

Onen had an op-ed published in The Daily Monitor on the subject of witchcraft. Included in his article was a challenge:

Anyone who thinks witchcraft works should contact me and collect two million shillings upon a successful demonstration of this so called black-magic.

The danger I see in the challenge is just what qualifies as witchcraft "working"? What came to mind was an observation the anthropologist Gregory Bateson--surely a freethinker--made about the matter:

I believe that all spells, meditations, incantations, suggestions, procedures of sympathetic and contagious magic, and the like, do indeed work--but they work upon the practitioner (as does "psychic energy"). But I presume that none of these procedures has any effect at all upon any other person unless that other participates in the spell or suggestion or at least has information or expectation that such spell or procedure has been performed.

But where these conditions are met and the other person is partly aware of what is being done and aware of its purposes aimed at himself or herself, I am sure that magical procedures can be very effective either to kill or cure, to harm or bless.

It's probably too simplistic a way of making the point, but a challenge like James Onen's taking Bateson's view into account, ought to be careful to make sure that ringers are excluded from the demonstration.

The 27th Comrade uses fairly formal reasoning. This has advantages and disadvantage. One of the advantages is that there is a structure to follow. A disadvantage for me about it is that I'm not well-versed in formal logic and I'm not so sure formal logic really applies to some of the rhetorical uses he put it too. Anyhow this post from Feburary, It's The Axioms, Friend provides a good introduction to his approach. Meanwhile 70 or so posts later I'm think in the weeds. The 27th Comrade has referenced Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems, here, and in a more recent post insists on completeness, here. In the first case it seems to me that he's using Godel's theorems as a sort of analogy. In the second case my sense is that completeness is more narrowly defined than to the circumstances it's being applied. In any case there's a technical level of the posts which I'm really not competent to address except in a clumsy way.

In looking up the post on Axioms, I noticed that I commented about Bateson on that post. Something that's become evident in our discussions is we both find hard materialism, a mechanistic view that reduces everything to physical bodies subject to impacts and displacements results in some horrible thinking. The 27th Comrade goes after this line of thinking in his formal way. I wanted to say a bit how I come at it, and the thinking of Gregory Bateson is a touchstone to me.

Bateson was opposed to mechanistic thinking about life, but he also opposed supernatural explanations. A central topic in my conversations with The 27th Comrade has been the intersection of Darwinian theory and the new atheism.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is primarily known these days for a fallacy concerning inhertiance of acquired characteristics. But he was an important proponent pre-Darwin of evolution. Prior to Lamarck for most naturalists a hierarchy was assumed with God at the top. Mind emanated from the top down so to speak. Lamarck retained the order of life, but as Bateson observed in his book Mind and Nature:

A Necessary Unity:" The unity of epistemology was retained in spite of a shift in emphasis from transcendent Logos to immanent mind.

As I understand the 27th Comrade this idea of immanent mind makes not sense to him. Nevertheless, Bateson provides a critique of materialism from this perspective.

Bateson proposed six criteria of mental process in his book "Mind and Nature." He goes into some depth, but I'll just list the criteria here:

1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than to energy.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of events which preceded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content) but are themselves subject to transformation.
6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.

Bateson wasn't so sure of the actual content of his criteria, but felt sure that the idea that some structuring of "epistemology, evolution, and epigenesis is possible." My sense, and it's not terribly informed, is that these criteria have been met by some scholars favorably, but perhaps most contentious being the recruitment of logical types into the final criteria. That is a matter I suspect the 27th Comrade has some very useful things to say.

At this point it's clear that I've written long and haven't gotten very far, the very complaint I so often hear about my writing. I'll get around to saying more about Bateson's alternative critique of maerialism if the 27th Comrade thinks it at all interesting. But to close out this session I wanted to briefly go back to the subject of witchcraft "working."

Frequently when I think of prayer I think of some purpose like "Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." Heathen that I am, generally the prayers I endure politely in silence are ones spoken by fundamentalist Christians. I may not be quite fair but the words that stand out to me are with hands up "Lord,just, just just . . ." and my mind tends to fill in the gap with "titillate me!" But this is not the only sort of prayer. The prayers in my prayer book of youth are remarkable to the extent that they are designed to "work upon the practitioner." The sort of work to be effected is a change in perspective to a wider and less selfish view; for example, "Lord make me an instrument of thy peace ..." What I notice about prayer of this sort is that it's not necessary really to believe in transcendent Logos to feel relevant to a person. Even a dyed in the wool atheist can find the change in perspective such prayers offer valuable. Even atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens talk about feeling a sense of the noumenous. Such a sense it seems is an apprehension of relationship.

Bateson points out that prayer works so well for oneself we are easily tempted to apply prayer to what we want out there. He thought when we do this we move from religion to magic. What I think is often lost on unbelievers like me is the nuance and essential validity of much religion and prayers which help us to see ourselves as part of it, that is in relation to a universe of relations, are a fine example of what we miss. Separating real religion from magic is not just for the religious, but something more of us would do well to take seriously.

Tech and Kenyan Blogs

Oh heavens, I haven't been around at this blog for a long time. Like every space I inhabit, its in dire need of cleaning up. For the time being, excuse the clutter.

The impetus for this post comes from a post at The Black Campaign, Tech Killed the Kenyan Blog. It was cross-posted to A Kenyan Urban Narrative and the comments seem better there. Njorge Matathia has slightly different voices for the two blogs, and The Black Campaign might be his "yuppie" voice, while A Kenyan Urban Narrative the voice of Potash champion of ordinary Kenyans. Anyhow, the post fits both places well, as it begins with:

Days I miss: when Kenyan blogs were about stories. The politics of every day- the Kenyan way of life relived by voices hitherto unknown- and not big politics.

I posted one of my too long comments on his subsequent posts and he wrote me an email suggesting that I do my own blog post--very tactfully I might add. The picture is a screen shot of Trevor Horn of the Buggles from their 70's music video Video Killed the Radio Star. Back in those days the question was Beta or VHS--rival videotape formats. It wasn't so much that videos were new, but that people could record videos on a home machine to video tape. Technology advances, but it's never easy to predict what the ramifications of technology will be.

I like the edition of the post at A Kenyan Urban Narrative because that blog goes back to the times Potash is nostalgic for, and most of those who left comments there do too. A shared history is a big part of stories.

Matathia remembers the early day of Kenyan blogs when people were telling stories and linking to each other's blog posts. He writes of that time:

The parochialism was not only charming, it put fluency and local colour into the blogs and for one moment a pastiche of an immensely stratified and arbitrary nation called Kenya was starting to emerge.

He laments the passing of a a truly Kenyan-flavored network :

The pan-African curators or the African Internet’s power axis- chugging deux ex machina like in the background, all along- came to the fore and absorbed the Kenyan blogosphere into a broader African Internet narrative.

The common ground of this new narrative is around technology.

Of course the Kenyan context is particular, but there's a general issue of how to knit communities together and what role technology plays. In the the state of Vermont in the USA is a forum to knit at the very local level called the Front Porch Forum. We'll see lots more efforts to encourage such very local communications online. A part of these efforts are tech issues, but the bigger part are community issues. The good old days of the Kenyan Blogs weren't so local as the Vermont Front Porches and many writers imagined an even wider audience. Still, in having come together for a time there was a body of particularly Kenyan content online which coincided with more Kenyans accessing the Web. But now there is so many more venues for content what's missing is perhaps the sense that these sites present a uniquely Kenyan voice.

To promote their second studio album 82 the "experimental boy band" Just a Band uploaded a film to YouTube Makmende Returns highlighting the track "Ha-He" from the album. At Facebook the JaB fan page has about 3,659 fans. The Makmende fan page has got over 17,000 all in about a week's time. I don't have the patience to scroll through the fans, but it looks to me the majority are Kenyan. The YouTube video has about 23,000 views as I look tonight. I suspect that it's not so easy for people in Internet cafes in Kenya to watch the video at YouTube. I'm really curious if the video has gone viral in Kenya, and how? All their videos are cool. Makmende is particularly enjoyable to me because I'm old enough to remember the 70's when the Blaxploitation movies the video appropriates were popular.

Just a Band are multi-media artists. Matathia raises the point in his post that part of what did-in the Kenyan blogs was that the curation of them somehow escaped Kenyan borders. JaB is an example of artists using online social media effectively, and to an extent "effectively" means not holding on too tight but allowing the content to flow. I'm not sure for example that hundreds of Makmende jokes posted a day is sustainable, but the fan page will live on. Part of the appeal of blogs is the commitment to them is over a longer time than fan pages require. Perhaps the difference in numbers at Facebook between JaB's fan page and the Makmende fan page has to do with the sense that the jokes at the Makmende page won't be fresh forever so might as well be enjoyed "in season." In the present it's a gathering place for Kenyans all over.

Update: Ethan Zuckerman Makmende's so huge, he can't fit in Wikipedia

In the Kenyan blogs today perhaps the Gay blogs come as close to the sort of community that Matathia laments passing. Those blogs certainly are not overly concerned about tech subjects--although in general it seems that blogs by Africans are quick to adopt useful widgets. While these bloggers talk mostly about the scene in Kenya, certainly they also keep and eye out for a pan-African perspective. And no matter what the content of blogs or where they are written, it's a feature not a bug that people everywhere can blunder into them. Yet gay-themed blogs are perhaps too parochial in the sense that Kenyans looking for Kenyan content can easily by-pass them never really knowing they exist. There probably are many other subset of Kenyan blogs I don't know about.

Afrigator is a way to discover Kenyan blogs. Also since the blogs are rated by popularity it seems to provide some data to test Matathia's hypothesis about the tech take-over. I'm not sure how to do that somewhat objectively, but just pursuing the blogs I'm left with and equivocal yea and nay.

Matathia writes:

The death of Story came when Bloggers turned into professionals- Internet authorities. Suddenly the broadcaster and his equipment became more important than the broadcast.

Looking over the top blogs at Afrigator does to my mind reinforce the idea of "Internet authorities." There are almost 700 Kenyan blogs listed and I think since people sign up for Afrigator there's probably a selection bias towards tech-savvy people there.

I'm not so sure about the equipment becoming more important than the broadcast. Part of the problem is "broadcast" really doesn't quite describe what's happening with the new technologies. Bloggers are often putting content on different channels, like Facebook. But all of the channels also have feedback options so that readers can engage. Online content is peer to peer, many to many, so not quite like broadcast as we are used to thinking of it.

Facebook makes connections visible. Just in a cursory way I was looking at a few profiles linked from Kenyan blogs to Facebook and discovering that quite often mutual friends show up. I've never been to Kenya and am not especially connected so this surprises me. It is true that often the links are cyberactivists, For better or worse my connections have endured hearing my stories and I've heard stories too. I think that less than a hand full of my network at Facebook is from knowing people through the blogs they write. There are many venues for telling stories now.

One conclusion following from the observation that I, some random white guy in Western Pennsylvania, seems to have at least one connection made visible to the Kenyan blogosphere, is that the online world really is small. Potash with A Kenyan Urban Narrative surely has tried to provide a voice for those seldom heard. He admits that lots of regular folks are using Twitter and Facebook now and wants them to up their game, going beyond banal descriptions of their day-to-day towards the meanings they discover. Blogging for most requires more time than the 15 and 20 minute bites on the Internet most people buy. The short tweets, status updates and jokes are enough to say "I'm here!" and provide more bang for the buck. Some of my contacts to the Kenyan blogosphere are Western activists, but others are Kenyans who collect characters online.

Online participation in many frameworks to model it have watchers at the base. the simple observation that many more people will see something you put online than respond to it in a visible way. Beth Kanter provides a more descriptive framework from Forest Social Technographics: watching, sharing, commenting, producing and curating at the top. I'm no tech maven, but Matathia pins the blame on the demise of stories on Kenyan blogs not just on "Tech" but also with the curation of blog content. So I want to think aloud a bit more about curration, and who the curators might be.

Valdis Krebs uses social network analysis and blogs about it at TNT-The Network Thinker. In this post he provides a very simple diagram of a network and asks about it: "Where would you put your message?" The post gets rather involved, but a simple message is that very connected people aren't just the people who are so obviously connected. The Forest framework of course is about connections and the base who simply watch and don't post also don't curate much, but the other actions: sharing, commenting and producing seem to me to contain a bit of curation in them.

When I looked at my Facebook connections to prominent Kenyan bloggers one of my most productive links is a Kenyan fellow, I won't name in case to offend him. He doesn't blog and I don't see him putting much up at Facebook. I know him from the old Omidyar social network and now Ned. He's most active there participating in recreational games an posting an occasional wry comment in threads. Our direct correspondence isn't too extensive, yet we both know about each other from watching posts, and I think we are both what others might call slightly off-beat characters. I don't know him from comments on Kenyan blogs I read, although it's quite possible he uses an Internet handle; it's also possible that he doesn't comment much on them which is what I suspect is the case. Nevertheless, in looking at my social network as revealed by Facebook, he's one of my most direct connections to it.

Topping the framework modeling online engagement with curation implies there are very few curators. Probably the number of people who identify as curators online is few in number. And I think most of us do think there ought to be more sites online that join together various content in unique ways. Curation is also a collective activity. Just a Band is a great band and they bring together creative people in producing wonderful videos and shows. I'm sure they knew in advance that their promotional video staring Makmende would get attention, but it seems the popularity of the Facebook Makmende fan page probably came as a surprise. Just in my dilly-dallying with this post the number of fans has increased from 17,000 to 25,000 and counting--eight times the number of fans on the JaB fan page. I don't think all these people are new fans of JaB, but rather joining in the fun of Makmende is what enticed them to go a step further than just watching.

The length of this post is a good sign that I've not gotten around to making any point, so summing up is pointless, nevertheless her goes: One of the points I thin Njorge Matathia makes in his post is that the wide variety of venues for posts has diluted the availability of Kenyan stories online. Everyone got so interested in the tools that they forgot the stories. But the tools have changed the stories being told too. Blogs are still one of the best ways for people to make pages to share online with others. Facebook is getting lots of new folks accustomed to putting stuff online, and when it comes to making pages they might well choose to do it there. There are advantages to blogs versus the walled-garden sites. I like very much that Potash and Njorge use Facebook to get people to his blog because it demonstrates some of these advantages. One of the big advantages of blogs is there are hundreds of great Kenyan blogs all with social networks that often touch Facebook but expand beyond it.

There is also a point that I haven't addressed, as this post is too long already won't in any depth right now, that can be stated as a question: "How is an artist to make money nowadays?" JaB provides some clues of what it is to make something of a living from music, but written works, story authorship isn't just the same. I'll talk about this problem in a subsequent post.

Stories

I'm disappointed the picture doesn't show much detail. It looks funerary because it is indeed a shot inside a funeral home. When my mother died her remains were cremated, so for the visitation and memorial service we wanted something there to remind people of Mother. We emptied out a cupboard and filled it with artifacts from her life. There's a quilt she sewed under a piece of an old woven bedspread which we pinned photos. In the cupboard there's her sewing basket and a notebook with recipes. The Srabble board is open with the yellow pad we kept score. In her last days she wasn't always too coherent, but still managed to beat me in a game. Her vocabulary was immense.

This trope worked very well, there are too many little details to point out in the cupboard, but you get the picture. After we gathered together to say our prayers and sing our songs, we closed the door and locked it. Then a few of the grandchildren carried the chest to my mother's pickup truck to load it on for a parade back to our house for food. Along the parade home the chest fell over, and very nearly off the truck. That was funny and appropriate because my mother was always strapping something to the car to transport and on a few occasions she actually did loose the load. Where do stories like this fit?

This story has nothing to do with Kenya, I've never traveled to Kenya and nor did my mother. But I'm still ruminating on Njorge Matathia's post Tech Killed The Kenyan Blog. The cupboard we quickly filled with artifacts which somehow told stories about my mother occurred to me because those artifacts were so physical. And I wondered about the artifacts we create in cyberspace and the issue of curation which Matathia raises. I'm sure he making a good point, but it's so hard for me to place the blame on "tech."

Umair Haque has a new post up, The Social Media Bubble which seems to me to be making a similar point in a more general context; essentially that our online relationships are too thin and insubstantial. I'm not sure I agree with him either. I do note that the number of responses to his post seem greater in number than usual. Some of the comments are strongly in agreement, but most seem to offer nuance. Haque writes:

Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

I certainly have "lasting" relationships from online connections. What's true of most of these relationships is a great physical distance between us, but I'm loathe to think that the distance makes these relationships less than real.

There is some quite brilliant writing on blogs--I certainly haven't produced any. While I do seek out brilliant writing, I'm quite happy reading the quick and ready writing that's more common online. If friends were to memorialize me with my online writing, it's not clear what the story would show. Clearly that I'm a poor speller and proof reader would be evident, but that's not much of a story. Social media has introduced me to profound friendships that I'm truly grateful for. But my own online content when viewed objectively reveals a shoddy quality, and I'm hardly alone.

What I think both Matathia and Haque critiques have in common is a question of how to increase the thickness and quality of both personal relationships and content produced online. Both note the central importance of authentic relationships to such production. Certainly being in the same room can help forge authentic relationships, but there's no guarantee. There seems a certain similar ambiguity about content, like online writing. Physical content, like the the objects in we put into the cupboard to tell stories about my mother, seem to have authenticity that's hard to quibble with. Content displayed online seems to invite more quibbling. For people of a certain age works in print have a special sort of authenticity.

I'm very much in favor of beautifully made books with exquisite content. But I also like the idea of very inexpensive books. I want children to have stories they can enjoy and share with their friends. I want text books cheap enough for every school to afford to have them. It's easy to imagine that e-book readers in the near future will be inexpensive. I like the idea of e-book, but still think that printed books have a future. What's true right now is that computers and the Internet make the editorial production side of inexpensive books easier than before.

I noted with interest something Dimitri Orlov has done in part to help raise some funds so he can continue writing a book he's working on. Here's how he puts it:

Two years and just under a million unique visitors later it is time for this blog to ask for something back. But instead of an endless beg-a-thon, I've decided to give my readers something valuable in return for their donations: anyone who donates in excess of $20 will receive a numbered, autographed copy of a limited edition book which contains five of the most significant (and longest) essays I have published between 2005 and 2009.

So he's self-published a book of some of his Internet writing to participially fund writing a proper book. I like that. Perhaps it's because I'm "of a certain age," that makes me love books so. It's more than that, I think, books are a remarkable invention.

Dimitri Orlov writes about collapse of civilizations. When in that state of mind I often wonder about lost technologies, for example the scraping of movable type printing presses. I'm not really sure what the best sort of printing process for really cheap books is. Very expensive printing presses can cheaply produce mass quantities of books, there's already a market model for that kind of production. What I'm interested in finding is a printing process that's cheap for a more distributed production model. Back before photocopiers were common there were mimeograph machines, distinct from spirit duplicators to which people my age have a nostalgic attachment to from the aroma of the alcohol that lingered on the sheets. Mimeographs used cut stencils, the common method was to use a typewriter to cut the stencils, although the stencils could be cut by hand writing with a pen or stylus.

I had thought the mimeograph process had become extinct, but modern versions of the machines are quite neat. They use scanner technology and a thermal head to cut the stencil. The printing is faster and cheaper than toner-based photocopiers. And for runs of up to about 5,000 pages cheaper than offset printing. The machines are not cheap, but cheaper than many photocopiers. They are however heavy and so not as portable as the older mimeograph machines. Once the pages have been printed binding the books is something that could be done with little investment in tools, and various investments in time.

I strongly suspect that I'm missing something essential about this, because if it's such a good idea why aren't people already doing it?

I'm not sure of the right formula, there actually probably are many formulas which are "right." I do think that print is far from being obsolete, so that one of the key challenges is to find ways to bring some writing and make it live in print. One of the attributes of online writing is that it's often done for free or entailing very little monetary reward. The habit of thought about printed works always seems to point in the direction of requiring lots of money. Thinking really cheap seems to open all sorts of new possibilities.

I was with friends last night telling stories around a bon fire. The moon lit the woods in wonderful moonlight and no other setting I can think of is more conducive to telling stories. In regards to one idea or another a friend said that ideas are like a generally unmentioned--at least in polite company--human orifice, and we've all got one.

One of the reasons that I have tried to encourage my friends in meatspace to pay more attention to developments in Africa, comes around to a view that much of the technology we currently take for granted is unsustainable over the long term. In response interest in what E. F. Schumacher called intermediate technology strikes me as really good to cultivate. And from my obnoxiously privileged vantage point I make comments like: "If it works in Africa, it can work anywhere." I do think that a distributed publishing model of printed work has real potential in Africa. But what I'm realizing now is that making something work where I am has the same potential; i.e. what works for a poor guy in Pennsylvania might also work in Africa. It's hardly a new idea, I'm a late comer to zine culture. Still I think cheap books are a good idea, and the thing for me to do is to start making some!