The Ed Techie

Be a debaser

It's a boring truism that nearly every new technology is decried by certain parties (certain newspapers, self-appointed guardians of social mores, etc) as fundamentally undermining the fabric of society. From the first wave of communication and broadcast technology - radio, television, and telephones all had their dystopian critics. From my generation the social evil was the home video recorder. What havoc it would wreak, our juvenile minds rotted by video nasties, and our social skills stunted by spending all our times in front of screens. And of course come the PC and internet we've had enough scare stories about games, social networking, and hell, the internet as a whole, to leave us in no doubt that we used to have a Camelot and then naughty technology came along and rent us asunder from it.

The underlying theme to all these stories (pick any recent Twitter scare story as an example) is technology debases us. Debase = 'To reduce from a higher to a lower state or grade of worth, dignity, purity, station, etc'. The obvious flaw in this argument is that we don't measure the 'higher' state often enough to know if any 'lowering' has actually occurred. But even if this were so (say we measured a lowering of literacy rates, lower book sales or some other measure), what it never captures is the transformative effect on society - the new ways we develop for communicating, and if humans are anything they are communicators.

What this is leading to is that perceived debasement from supposed higher states is a precursor for significant change. In education we hold on to the arguments of quality and academic reliability, which although surely important, become obstacles to any change. I am reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote, which gave the title to John Kennedy Toole's excellent novel: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." 

For technology this would be rephrased something like "When significant technology appears in society, you may know it by this sign, that the guardians will call it a debaser." So, the next time someone raises an objection about your use of technology that they are concerned about quality, or standards, thank them heartily, for you will know you are on the right track.

Debasers, I salute you!

Running with the missus

<Image - Cardiff Clowns by Left-hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/left-hand/2964743595/>

As some of you may know, at the end of last year my wife was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Some fairly horrific surgery ensued (grafts of arm skin onto tongue to create a pragmatically termed 'flap', neck dissection to remove lymph glands, further graft from belly to fill the patch on the arm). I'm a queasy male, so clipping toenails has me feeling a bit uneasy, so I have no idea how she endured this.

Then a 6 week dose of radio and chemo-therapy followed. While there are surely no 'good' places to get cancer, one of the insidious elements of it being in the mouth is that as radiotherapy does its business (basically killing cells), you get to taste your own body's decay. Constantly. It would prove to be a very effective torture since there is no escaping it.

After all this though the treatment has been successful and she is now healthier and fitter than ever. Most years we run the Cardiff Half-Marathon, but not usually together, me being all competitive and wanting to improve my time. But this year she set the half-marathon as a goal to mark her recovery, and we'll be running it together. Which brings me on to the inevitably charity call - she has a just-giving page, so if any of you feel like giving, it'd be much appreciated (and no, we won't be running as clowns).

Born again

Not being one of those, you know, obsessive bloggers, every summer my blogging activity takes a dip. This summer we went to France for an extended holiday, and I barely twittered, let alone blogged, for four weeks. This happens most summers as the graph below shows of my twitter activity (from tweetstats).

Then every September I face the problem of getting started again. In this respect every year I get to be reminded how it feels to be a new blogger. When you are 'in the network' - you're reading blogs regularly, engaging with twitter, linking out to others, and blogging sufficiently to have comments and feedback then blogging itself becomes easier. What all this requires is momentum - you need to be part of the conversation/network/hive/whatever you want to call it.

It's easier if you are just starting up again though - within a week I'll be back in the swing of it, but it's much harder to get started with all this stuff. You need to build up your network to have something to react to, but you are also building on top of your own existing material. I'm not sure when it comes, but there is a (I don't want to use this term) tipping point when it stops being a graft and becomes something of second nature because you have sufficient inertia.

And in the meantime, you can always do blog posts about the struggle to blog...