Signs of the Times

I’ve just become acquainted with the Beloit College Mindset List, which is apparently a yearly ritual going on since 1998. It simply details what the mindsets of incoming freshmen are in a few details; this year, of course, they are detailing the mindsets of the class of 2014 at this Wisconsin liberal arts college. I had a few thoughts when reading it.

First off, as the opening blurb notes, this generation of children were “[b]orn when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage.” I read this with some degree of surprise and skepticism. Quick, I thought: subtract, carry the one…eighteen-year-olds were born in 1992? Really? Born after the Berlin wall came down, after the end of the entire Cold War, after the first war in Iraq was started, fought, and finished, and yet they’re old enough to vote and drive automobiles? Shocking, but true.

I’m sure older generations share the same thoughts about me, of course. “What?” they’d say. “You were born after the Vietnam war, and yet you can vote and drive cars?” And it’s a valid point; younger generations by nature remember different things than older. But this generation (as the subsequent parts of the report make clear) is both myopic and amnesiac, so its lack of memory of such minor world events as the forty-year nuclear standoff between America and Russia, as just one example, is particularly important.

Furthermore, these older generations and I were, mostly, born in the same era of history. My parents and I, for example, were both born during the Cold War. There were two Germanies and two Berlins, the latter of which were separated by a big wall, and people fairly regularly got shot trying to get across it. Having nuclear missiles pointed at us was a fact of life that we all took for granted. We were both aware of where the fallout shelters were located, though we rarely thought about it; we do, in fact, know what the fallout shelter sign looks like, and it was odd to neither of us. We both wrote papers for school in longhand (my first, anyway, though admittedly I was very young), we grew up familiar with the clack-clack-clack of typewriters, we didn’t get to use calculators in school (at least, not until pre-calculus), and we all knew how to draw graphs by hand. We’ve had to wait six to eight weeks for something we sent off for to arrive. We grew up listening to the radio (you know, radio that comes over the air, for free) and know what magnetic tape is. We both experienced the wonder that was cable television and the VCR when they became common (though again, I was young, I do clearly remember both). We both knew about film, both strips of film for playing movies and regular film for photographs. We’ve had to walk up to the television in order to change the channel, and we were both familiar with that giant metal mess on every roof in the neighborhood that picked up television signals. And so on.

Not so with this generation. They’ve never thought of Russia as an important world power; two Germanies is an alien thought to them, much less one Germany which is under an oppressive, dictatorial regime which shoots people for trying to get to the other one. If they know any physical recording medium, it’s CDs and CDs alone; most likely they’re more familiar with digital recording. They’ve never had to rewind magnetic tape onto reels; have never seen, much less used, film, either moving picture or regular picture; and have probably never seen a typewriter, certainly never actually used one. And so on.

This is a much more significant difference between my generation (I’m on the very tail end of mine, I think) and the next than there is between mine and my parents’. For this reason, I think it’s sometimes interesting and instructive to go through silly little surveys like this. I’ll go through it a piece at a time, skipping any bits I don’t think are interesting; hopefully I’ll get some comments.

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

What a depressing characteristic. But it’s unquestionably true; indeed, only about half (at a guess) of my graduating class could write in cursive. I write in it exclusively; it’s just plain better than printing. Indeed, not long ago “writing” was cursive; printing was something different, something children did before they learned to write. But longhand is a vanishing art, it seems; a shame, since it’s an art that all can practice.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

This is one of the many instances of the mindset survey that gives one the impression of a generation of hyperactive impatients, and in some ways that’s exactly what we’ve got. Mail is very quick; when I was a child, sending away for things always took “six to eight weeks” according to the catalogues, and it really did. Now it takes a couple of days at most. And email is too slow? Really? One wonders what this generation is willing to wait for, if they’re willing to dedicate so little time and energy to communication that even email takes too long for them.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

Really? Among middle-upper class yuppies, maybe; the people I live with and work with couldn’t pronounce “macchiato,” much less know what it is. (I can pronounce it, but I’ve got neither an idea nor an inclination to acquire an idea of what it means.) Part of this is prejudice; my father taught me that coffee is coffee, and its purity should not be impugned by the additional of corruptive elements like cream, sugar, and other creative flavorings. (I’ve always, consequently, drunk it black.) But I question whether this is true. Our society (my generation and my parents’ not excepted) is becoming increasing coddled and corrupt, but I don’t think it’s so coddled and corrupt that we’re all willing to pay seven dollars for a hazelnut mocha latte, even if we do know what a “mocha” is.

Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

Gah! Sad, but true. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Punk?” I’ve never been a big fan of his westerns, but occasionally he produces something really great, like Gran Turino. It’s funny that nobody remembers Dirty Harry anymore, but I’ll confess that I can’t remember the last time I thought of him, either.

Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

Yes, when did this happen? They just sort of snuck up on us, I suppose. These days, the superiority of foreign cars is sadly a given, rarely questioned, Korean cars not excepted. The fact that these foreign cars owe their market successes in large part of favorable trade policies in Japan and Korea that America kindly refuses to reciprocate is neither known nor cared about by most. That, of course, isn’t limited by generation, either.

They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

That’s right! And they don’t know what rotary phones are, either! It’s getting common not even to have a landline phone. Anyone else remember when the idea of a pocketbook phone was risible?

Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

More than that, they probably have never taken film in for development; instant gratification, all the way. But you used to not know what a picture would look like until days later, sometimes weeks. You’d take four or five pictures of everything to make sure at least one turned out right. And you only got thirty or so pictures on a roll; then you’d have to take that roll out and replace it. Don’t let the light shine on the film part, or you’ll lose it!

Not to mention stringing long strips of film into a film projector, so that you could watch a film with the sound obscured by the clattering of the motors as the film made its way from one reel to the other, and “rewinding” meant literally rewinding it back onto its original reel. Ah, those were the days!

Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

Ha! Really? I was just a bit too young for the glam rock of the 80s (heard the older kids listening to it, of course), and in those heady days of my wasted youth I cut my teeth on Nirvana. I’m much too young for the popular music of my youth to be on an oldies station. Aren’t I?

Fortunately, I’ve found better music since.

Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

What a miserable commentary on our society. We come from a great civilization, which has been producing great music for centuries; yet the repertoire of our people consists of the last fifty years of popular piffle produced by huge record companies solely in consideration of maximization of profit by taking advantage of a suddenly large and powerful youth demographic. And not only that, but even our highest political events are accompanied by this cacophonous wailing. Can’t we do better than this?

I must say that the generation following mine is actually better than mine in this matter; while their taste in music is little improved, if at all, they at least direct fashion in music rather than receiving it all passively, as my generation and my parents’ did. Nothing, after all, is all bad.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

This is the most earth-shattering of all the differences; Russia is really just another country to the next generation, like Poland or Japan. Nothing interesting. I remember when Russia invaded Georgia recently, some younger people urging an immediate American military response to that invasion, scoffing at the possibility of war with Russia as no big deal. I was thunderstruck.

What? War with Russia is no big deal? That’s the nightmare scenario that’s been giving people the sweating terrors for decades! That’s end-of-the-world quality scary! We’re talking about worldwide desert, Mad-Max destruction here! Of course, they don’t know who Mad Max is, either.

But they have no recollection of such fears; even my generation has only a slight one, though it’s enough in general to make as at least aware that Russia remains a powerful country. (Sadly, some people want us to fight her anyway, despite knowing better; but that’s another question.)

Anyway, just some interesting tidbits. I’m aware that I’m probably not entirely typical for my generation; I remember clearly things that most people my age don’t, for example. But these are my thoughts. And note that I’m not doing a “these young whippersnappers” curmudgeonry here; I’m young enough that I can’t credibly do an imitation of a crotchety old man. I like computers and email; digital photography has many advantages over old-school film; I’m not a fan of rotary phones (remember how you used to hate calling people with lots of nines and zeroes in their numbers?); and so on. The next generation isn’t all bad, and overall isn’t any worse than my own or my parents’ (both of which are pretty bad, in a lot of ways). These are just off-the-cuff thoughts on a few issues raised by this little survey. Anyone else have any?

Praise be to Christ the King!

Happy Birthday, Debian!

Sadly, I missed it by a day (yesterday was St. Joachim’s day, more importantly), but Debian turned seventeen years old yesterday. Happy birthday, Debian! Happy birthday to the best, most stable, greatest GNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd, and GNU/kFreeBSD) distribution in the world!

I started out in the GNU/Linux world in the summer of 2000 with Mandrake Linux (which has since become Mandriva), which for reasons I can’t really remember I didn’t like, and didn’t stick with for longer than a few days. I then got my hands on a Red Hat 7.1 CD, which I installed; that was a disaster, and I didn’t stick with it for more than a few weeks. The rpm system just didn’t do it for me, and mixing that with just learning the superior operating system paradigm of Unix was trouble.

Then I found Debian. And I’ve never looked back.

Debian was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. The deb system (at the time, dselect was the greatest front-end; since then they’ve come up with aptitude and apt-get, which are so easy that installing and removing software is something I do on a whim, just to see what it does) was like a dream; the enormous collection of packages (25,000 strong these days) was like a wonderland of useful utilities; and the free world of GNU/Linux was opened up to me.

In 2005, I was in a car accident, and my computer (I lived with my wife and two children in a tiny 800 square foot apartment; we didn’t have room for a desktop) was smashed to death. We managed to salvage the data, but I had to buy a new laptop; and my law school didn’t play nice with Linux at all. So I was forced to return to the dark side until 2007, when I installed (again, on a whim) Ubuntu, and was hooked on GNU/Linux again immediately. Granted, I had to mangle Ubuntu pretty thoroughly to make it much like GNU/Linux, but I did it and was pleased.

But I didn’t stay with Ubuntu for too long; it was too limiting. And upgrading was a nightmare; doing a dist-upgrade was troublesome at best, and usually just backing up your data and reinstalling from disk was a better idea. Nothing doing; before long, I was back with Debian.

My old friend Debian. Versatile; free; solid as a rock. Nothing beats it.

Praise be to Christ the King!

On Text and its Tools

The invention of writing is surely the greatest thing that man has ever created. Without writing, we have little philosophy; tradition is harder to maintain and advance; culture is difficult to improve; technology is harder to spread; history in all but its greatest details is forgotten.

Indeed, writing is such an amazing yet simple thing that those unfamiliar with it often mistake it for magic. In Black Robe, for example, there is a compelling scene in which the Jesuit priest, Father LaForgue, is seen writing in a journal. One of the Indians asks him why he is sitting around doodling, and he responds that he is writing, and decides to give the Indians a demonstration. Father LaForgue asks the Indian, Chomina, to tell him something that Daniel, the other Frenchman in the party, wouldn’t know; Chomina responds that his wife’s mother died the previous winter in the snow. Father LaForgue writes it down and then carries it over to Daniel, who had been busy with other chores. Daniel reads it aloud, and the Indians were shocked and amazed; how had Daniel learned this? No one had told him about it. Never having experienced writing, it was difficult for them to understand how words could be put on paper, where no one actually speaks them. Indeed, they began at that moment to suspect the Black Robe, as they called Father LaForgue, of being a demon, because he was able to pass knowledge without speaking.

The stuff of writing, the spoken word made permanent without speech, is called text. You are reading text right now. Every book we have ever picked up, every letter we have ever written, every sign with letters on it is full of text. Text is speech unspoken; it is a great thing, an amazing thing. Too often, we take it for granted; but it is one of the greatest things man has ever produced.

The advent of computers has enabled us to deal with text in many very interesting and exciting ways, and it has greatly multiplied the amount of text we have at our disposal. It has also made it much easier to produce text; we have lots of tools which allow us to type things, which is a faster and easier way of producing text than writing. (Not always better; but certainly faster and easier, once the learning curve of typing has been surmounted.) Unfortunately, these tools have often been the cause of a decrease in the quality of our writing. Part of this is due simply to the volume; when it’s so easy to write and publish, one is bound to get more low-quality writing and publishing. However, some of this is due to the tools we use; the vast majority of us use the wrong tools, tools which make our writing worse, and the experience of writing more difficulty and less enjoyable than it has to be.

Marshall McLuhan famously stated that “the medium is the message,” and in this context the medium is also the messenger. The way we write is affected by the medium with which we write. This relates to computers to the great divide in producing text: the word processor and the text editor. This distinction bears a little discussion.

The word processor has two primary characteristics, the first of which is a necessary characteristic and the second of which is common but not necessary.

1. WYSIWYG: Word processors are all so-called “What You See Is What You Get” editors of text. That is, the text is entered and displayed to the user in precisely the same format that the user expects to see in the finished document. The fonts, font families, characteristics, sizes, formatting, and so on are all applied right there on the screen, and they are applied in real-time, while the user is typing.
2. Binary data formats: Most word processors utilize binary data formats. That is, the content of the writings that are produced with these programs is encoded in a binary format that is not directly readable by human beings or by any other program. Microsoft Word and Corel Wordperfect both use formats of this type; Openoffice does not.

Text editors, on the other hand, are simply what they sound like: text editors. They are much more akin to sitting down and writing in longhand than word processors are. Those of us old enough to remember writing stories and documents in longhand—even if barely old enough—will know that one simply sits down and starts writing. One marks the logical structure of the document—where chapter breaks are located, for example—by writing “Chapter 1.” One does not carefully format this in a particular font, or ensure that the spacing above and below is appropriate, or adjust the margins in a certain way. One simply writes it, then proceeds with the text. There is no option for significantly altering the style of the document, because it’s all just text. When one wants the document styled in a certain way, one sends it to a typesetter, who looks at the logical structure one has put in the work—chapters, sections, underlines, and so on—and turns them into stylistic formatting. He is the one who bothers with making sure that all the chapter headings are fourteen points high and in small caps; the author writes text, he doesn’t typeset it.

In a text editor, the situation is similar. All the text is in the same font, and all the text is in the same size. There is no option for italics or boldface. Structure can be indicated by special punctuation marks, spacing, and similar devices, but not by visual formatting. It’s just text; formatting is a different job.

When someone is writing in a word processor, he isn’t thinking as much about the text because the formatting is constantly before him. He can’t type and not see things come up the way they’ll eventually look. It’s difficult to write in this context and not think about that appearance, sometimes even more than the text. But should this really be the concern of the author? Shouldn’t an author be thinking about what he’s writing, and think about its appearance at a later time, or even leave its appearance to someone else entirely?

The text editor makes this a reality, just as writing in longhand does. Visual formatting can be done by other programs, and should be done by other programs, which do it better; TeX and LaTeX are the best choices for this job, though there are others. They do this the same way that a manual typesetters formatted a document in the days of longhand writing; the author puts little clues in his document about its logical structure—that is, where the chapter and section breaks are, which text is more emphatic, and so on—and the typesetter converts those into visual realities. Indeed, with computers, the author can be in complete control of this visual formatting, informating TeX and LaTeX exactly how he wants his document to be formatted—and still keep that formatting entirely separate from the production of the actual text of the document, allowing him to focus on writing while he is writing and formatting at some other time, so as not to distract himself with pretties when he should be focusing on content.

So what text editor should you use? There are lots of choices here, but my recommendation is vim. vi is a text editor written by Bill Joy for Berkeley Unix decades ago, and vim is vi-improved. It’s got lots of features such as syntax coloring to help you keep your documents markup even further separated from your text, and its command mode is immensely powerful.

The learning curve is a bit steep; however, once that’s been surmounted you’ll feel hopelessly crippled anytime you use anything else. That includes when typing quick email messages into a webmail window; my primary impetus in installing and using mutt, and in choosing blosxom for the blog software for my upcoming serial novel, was precisely to allow me to type my content in vim rather than have to use one of these silly text windows (such as the one WordPress has provided, which I’m using now), which doesn’t have half the interface or a tenth of the power of a real text editor. vim, like most text editors, can be used with a mouse and menus if you wish; but once you’ve gotten past that learning curve, you won’t want to, as moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse will be an intolerable waste of energy. The keyboard commands are so quick, so easy, and so powerful that doing anything else is simply a waste.

So please, forget about your word processor; it’s stupid and inefficient. Adopt a text editor, learn it, master it, and focus on your content rather than its appearance again. The world will be a better place for it.

Praise be to Christ the King!