Sue Thomas

Obama - now we will see

I got up in the dark this morning to drive to Santa Barbara's Arlington Theater for a free viewing of Obama's Inauguration. I finally made it after getting lost yet again - the streetmap of SB still defies me - but I was so glad I went to be part of it. On the way I picked up a nonfat latte with this patriotic sleeve :) (Took a couple more for posterity)

The theater is built in Spanish colonial style, with dim orange lighting via electrc coach lamps, and it was impossible to get any decent shots to show you, but I can convey the sense of noise -  big cheers and claps for Carter and the Clintons,  boos for the Bushes, and even more boos for Cheney.. Big claps for a shot of boxes being moved into the White House.

Throughout the ceremony, we all stood when they stood and sat when they sat - there was a real sense of everyone watching together.

As for Obama - he looked incredibly tense as he waited to walk onto the platform, and when he screwed up the words of the oath I felt relieved to think that this smooth calm guy might actually be nervous - and then another part of me wondered cynically if that too was choreographed to remind people that he is human. But then his speech swept away my doubts once more - it was so impressive and direct, and I will even go and re-read it to check whether it really was as outward-looking as I remember.

But, as I left, I heard a man say 'Now we will see..' and someone responding 'Yes. But let's just enjoy today'. And that seems to be the mood around here. Today is fantastically uplifting. But now we will see.

Will Change We Can Believe In come to Obama's news media? A lesson taken from John Steinbeck

I first learned about life in the United States in the 1960s through reading John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. I was a twelve year old Dutch girl growing up in England and trying to get a sense of what it meant to belong somewhere. It is a furiously bitter book, telling the story of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s when the exhausted farmlands of the American Mid West turned to powder, and millions of people set out to create new lives for themselves in California, suffering much hardship and disillusionment along the way. I've never forgotten crying into my pillow at the last few pages when young mother Rose of Sharon, bereaved of her stillborn baby but with milk still coming into her breasts, suckles an old man dying of starvation. And it wasn't long afterwards that I was weeping into my pillow again, first at the assassination of Kennedy [1963], and then at the death of Martin Luther King [1968]. So it was that my early encounters with America showed it to be a proud and idealistic culture which could also be savagely vicious and self-harming.

Today, it's Martin Luther King Day, a public holiday, and I am living temporarily in the sunshine state of California and working on a book. Everyone is very excited because the Inauguration of President Obama will take place tomorrow, a serendipitous piece of calendaring. Yes, everyone is very excited. Sunday's LA Times headline proclaimed: 'From sea to resilient sea: there's much 'hurting and hoping' across the land'. But I am wondering how much is really going to change once Obama is King of America? To my mind, the news media has a key responsibility here.

Across the street from my apartment is parked a vintage truck, a registered Californian Historical Vehicle. It doesn't seem to have moved for a long while, and is gathering leaves in what passes for winter here. Every time I walk by it it, I'm reminded of Steinbeck's Joad family. The vehicle they piled all their belongings into seventy years ago when they set out for a good life in the West could have looked something like this truck. They made an optimistic start, but had to endure terrible hardship, degradation and loss.

This week it feels like America is gearing up for another enormous migration, this time cultural rather than geographic. She is piling her hopes and dreams into the vehicle of an Obama presidency and setting off towards the sunshine state of Change. But does she really understand what lies ahead? The Joads thought they'd succeed because they were prepared to work as hard as was necessary, but they didn't know the bigger picture. Today, for America, knowing the bigger picture means humbly taking its place as a part of the rest of that very diverse habitat known as Planet Earth. Recognising that the rest of the world exists would be a good start, because much as I love and respect this country, and I do, I despair of its insularity. Since arriving two weeks ago I've watched a lot of CNN and MSNBC - both great news machines employing highly intelligent people (of whom the most notable and interesting is currently Rachel Maddow - check her out) But all they ever talk about is themselves. Hey! There's a world out there!

So I have one request for Change We Can Believe In: that Maddow and her network colleagues, and their comedy mirrors Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, spread their impressive intelligences a little wider. I suggest they begin by allocating just 10% of their daily programming to investigating the rest of the world with the same high level of critical insight and rigorous enquiry they apply to internal affairs, then maybe as time goes on they could even increase it just a little bit until there is finally some global balance in their reporting. The news media simply must take this responsibility, or respect for the United States will continue to sink even after Obama-isation. It will feel strange at first, but America will eventually get used to the fact that there are other people living on this planet. After all, as Tom Joad said when faced with the reality of a desperate situation: "It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do."

Living in California - driving, waste disposal, and the postal service

One of the things I enjoy most about being in the US is learning about the small differences in the practice of everyday life. This week, as I set up my temporary home in Santa Barbara, I've encountered quite a few. Here are some examples:

Transliteracy Lecture

Transliteracy lecture by Sue Thomas from IOCT on Vimeo.

This talk is drawn from the article Transliteracy: Crossing Divides, written with my DMU colleagues and published at First Monday in December 2007. I've presented it numerous times over the last year and now have this video version. But be warned - the lecture covers a lot of ground and it's 42 minutes of me talking, so not for the faint-hearted. Maybe one day I'll have time to slice it into bite-size chunks but for the moment I'm afraid there's only this long version. It was delivered to a mixed group of postgraduate students from the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media, the IOCT Master's degree, and students working on Music Technology, in the IOCT on October 24th, 2008

Credit: the video was filmed and edited by Adam Weikert, IOCT.

Brown pelicans dying in California

I took this photo yesterday on Goleta State Beach. It was one of three dead brown pelicans I saw at low tide that day. These glorious birds are dying all along the coast, and they are also exhibiting odd behaviour, as The Los Angeles Times reported:

It's a mystery with no answer yet: Why are California brown pelicans turning up far from home, and in many cases confused, fatigued and with bruised pouches?  The Times' Louis Sahagun reports:

    In the last week, the big brown birds known for flying in formation over beaches have been reported wobbling across Culver Boulevard in Playa del Rey and on a Los Angeles International Airport runway. Two dead pelicans were found on the 110 Freeway. Elsewhere, one smacked into a car.

    "We're a little freaked out by this," said Rebecca Dmytryk, spokeswoman for the nonprofit WildRescue. "We've never seen anything like it."

Wildlife rescuers and biologists are stumped; domoic acid, a neurotoxin sometimes found in algae, is a known threat to pelicans and other marine animals, but this isn't the season for it.  So what gives?

    "We just became aware of this problem a few days ago," said David Caron, a professor of biological sciences at USC who was analyzing pelican blood samples sent to him from throughout the state. "By the end of the week, we'll have information that should tell us whether or not these animals test positive for phytoplankton toxins."

It's estimated that about 70,000 breeding brown pelican pairs live in California and Baja California, although they're still listed as an endangered species .

See also this BBC video report

On my first visit to California I was captivated by hosts of pelicans gliding low across the water as they followed the resident dolphins across the ocean at Zuma Beach, diving with huge splashes to grab fish stirred up by their companion species. I hope that whatever disease they have will soon work its way out.

Life in California and problems of pronunciation

Today I'm setting off on a four month research trip to Southern California.  I've been funded by the British Academy to write about the history of cyberspace - most specifically, the history of the use of nature metaphors in computing and the internet. I'll be  visiting libraries, museums, research centres and corporate campuses, and interviewing people working in the industry as well as the writers and observers who have documented the phenomenal development of online culture in the forty years since the first two nodes of the internet were connected in September 1969. There's a website for this project, The Wild Surmise, and I'll be reporting on my progress there. I'll be based at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

On a more personal note, I'm looking forward to being American for a while. I'll be living in an apartment complex in Goleta, close to the UCSB campus (above), and of course I'm very excited about being in the US on 20th January when President-Elect Obama is sworn in. On a micro level, I'll enjoy learning about day-to-day life in California, and will keep an eye open for bloggable items of interest.

Here's the first one: the prevalence of automated telephone systems means I'm going to have to get used to pronouncing English words the American way - something which feels very strange! Calling Cox to arrange my broadband involves telling the machine that I am calling about 'high-speed innernet' - if I say 'internet' it may not understand me. But I guess that is nothing to my past experiences of waiting staff not understanding the word 'banana' until pronounced in nasal American with a short 'a' in the middle rather than the long ban-ahhh-na I'm used to. So if you happen to be standing behind me when I struggle to pronounce English the American way - please be patient. I'm trying my best to make myself understood in a foreign land!

Smiling online nourishes our relationships

My watchword for 2009 is 'nourish' - relationships, oneself, and one's community as a whole. And yesterday turned out to be a good example of nourishment in practice. My family held a little farewell party for me because tomorrow I'm departing for a four-month research trip to California.  Most of us are pretty connected and in touch a lot by email, Facebook, texting and phonecalls, but it's a long time since we were all physically together in one person's home and it was a really lovely and warm occasion.

I was reminded of it today when I saw a tweet from Tim O'Reilly pointing to a post by Stowe Boyd commenting on research on Social Networks and Happiness conducted by Nicholas A Christakis and James H Fowler reported at The Edge.

It explains how posting smiling pictures of oneself strengthens online interactions. Here's an excerpt:

The figure below is a map of part of this Facebook network in 2007. It contains 353 students, each represented by a node; each line between two nodes indicates that the connected individuals were tagged in a photo together. Students who are smiling (and who are immediately surrounded by smiling people in their network) are colored yellow. Students who are frowning (and who are immediately surrounded by such serious looks) are colored blue. Shades of green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

Notice how strongly the blue nodes and the yellow nodes cluster together, indicating large-scale structure of smiling in the online network. Moreover, people who do not smile seem to be located more peripherally in the network. In fact, statistical analysis of the network shows that people who smile tend to have more friends (smiling gets you an average of one extra friend, which is pretty good considering that people only have about six close friends). Not only that, but the statistical analyses confirm that those who smile are measurably more central to the network compared to those who do not smile. That is, if you smile, you are less likely to be on the periphery of the online world.

It thus seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

This makes a lot of sense, so in the interests of nourishing my social networking practice I'm replacing my Facebook profile picture with one which is almost embarrassing in its smileyness...