Is the amount of information in the world really increasing?

Googling for something else yesterday, I found this paper by David Berreby: The Myth of Peak Attention.

As Berreby points out, people tend to take the view that their current situation is unique in history. He shows that the idea that life is speeding up, that too much information is being produced, is an old one, dating back to the start of the twentieth century and before. The assumption that there is more information nowadays is dubious, and reflects our personal feelings about the world around us.

I wonder how much of the belief people have that 'things are getting worse' comes from a selection effect, in that they tend to compare the world with what they remember from their youth – a time when they were healthier, more optimistic and had less responsibility.

Without having people to review old texts, like Berreby has done in this essay, it is easy to fall into the trap of making baseless assumptions about the present. With the current attacks on the humanities in UK universities, we could easily lose an important perspective about the scale of the changes in the world around us.

What if the amount of information in the world is a constant? 

Miscellany: alien invasion, the death zone and archive fever

  • Charles Stross' essay Invaders from Mars puts forward an interesting theory about the state of the world, with serious implications for SETI. 
  • Abandoned on Everest (via LinkmachineGo) is a gruesome essay (with pictures) about what happens to the bodies of those who die on Everest. The debate in the comments about the David Sharp controversy is both horrifying and fascinating.
  • Sarah Salway provides some interesting tips for short story writers. "Wait for the second thing".
  • "I’d like one-shot novels as well. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the tube was littered with single interesting pages of novels rather than discarded London Lites?" – Chris Heathcote
  • I love Matt Ogle's essay Archive Fever, which asks some important questions about the mass of data people are starting to accumulate through mobile phones and social media. "We’ve all become accidental archivists." I have over three thousand photos on my computer. I'm not sure what they are for. 

Cups and currency: a story of Latitude

This is something I wrote in the summary and lost among my draft posts, which is why it's so unseasonal. 

Monday morning, Latitude festival was packing up. I was thirsty but couldn’t buy a cup of tea because my money was tied up in cups.

Latitude had a two pound deposit on plastic pint glasses. I would come back to the van with a glass and forget to take it back with me. I had five by the end of Sunday. The campsite bar was open for a couple of hours on Monday morning for refunds so I traipsed down. I’d got the time wrong and arrived early so I joined the queue waiting for the tent to open.

Festivals are all about queueing and waiting, with occasional performances and food. The sun was hot and I pulled up my hoody to give me shade. A couple sat near me, the girl stroking her boyfriend's belly, a large plastic ring on her finger.

About twenty people waited ahead of me. The man at the front had a stack of about fifty cups, others had smaller piles. Some people arrived at the queue but didn't have time to wait. Some surrendered their cups to the two children in the queue, who counted and recounted the twenty cups they had. Someone told me that there had been kids looking for stray cups all around the site, stealing them from people taking drunken naps.

Others wanted to sell their cups to people in the queue. Some of them would exchange the cups for their standard value, but others were prepared to accept smaller amounts. A brief shadow-economy started to flourish.

With the sun beating down on me, I imagined what it could become if the bar didn't open soon. Since the queue had a limited amount of cash, it couldn’t keep paying face-value for cups. The exchange rate was going to fall before long. It wouldn’t be difficult to set up a futures market, trading cups against their future price.

The the door opened. The first man in the queue handed over his fifty cups. He came out with a bag of money, kissed it, and ran away. I stood up, adjusted my hood to keep the sun off, and shuffled forwards.

The Brighton Santa Dash 2010

Brighton-santa-dash-2010-1

Last Saturday, I entered the Brighton Santa Dash for the fourth time. This was my first race and it's a fun event. Despite better weather than some previous years, my time was quite slow. Drinking a couple of bottles of wine the night before may not have been the best preparation!

It is good to be running again, following some physiotherapy for my ongoing injury. 2010 hasn't been the best years I've had for running. While I ran 600 miles in 2009, I am likely to manage about 400 by the end of this year. As someone who loves long distances, it's been frustrating that the longest run I have managed this year is only 10 miles, and that back in January.

But I am now in training for the Brighton marathon, and did a fantastic 6 mile run with Mr Spicer on Sunday. My body is coping well with the increasing distances and I'm hoping to ward off any problems as I work towards April's marathon.

Brighton-santa-dash-2010-2
Brighton-santa-dash-2010-3

We Have Always Lived in the Slaughterhouse (reading on December 15th)

A new story of mine, We Have Always Lived in the Slaughterhouse is being read at the next Are You Sitting Comfortably night in Brighton. The event takes place at the Basement in Brighton on December 15th at 7:30pm, £6/£4. White Rabbit always put a huge effort into their nights and it is well worth attending.

The theme for the night is Horror. My story is an unpleasant story about an unusual domestic arrangement:

"When I was ten years old, I lived with my sister and my Mum in a slaughterhouse. Mum was hiding from her ex-husband, my sister’s Dad, and Uncle Harry thought we’d be safe in one of the old offices. Uncle Harry converted the disused office into a living area, with beds and a small gas stove. He even found some oilskin, hosed down and cleaned, and hung it as curtains, giving each of us our own areas. We didn’t mind living in that old office. Better to hide there than to see our mother beaten." 

I'm hoping that the night will be the perfect antidote to the Christmas preparations. See you there?

Not for the Faint Hearted and the third thought

Last night was the ninth Not for the Faint Hearted session that Ellen and I have run. I still feel the same excitement about the event that I felt for the first. We're also still bringing in new people along with our regulars. That mix of friends and newcomers is one of the things that keeps it fresh.

The prompt images that we used last night were:

This time we used several black and white archive images. Weirdly I found those more difficult to write about than modern photos.

My favourite thing about these sessions is hearing the different responses people have had to the same images. For me, one of the challenges is finding a good idea in the time available while still having time to write it.

I know now that I can write and edit a basic story in about 90 seconds – although I prefer to have longer. This gives me time to sift through ideas, abandoning the first few until I encounter one that surprises me. This reminds me of some advice that the journalist Caitlin Moran was given by Alan Coren:

"The first idea that occurs to you, will have occurred to everyone. The second idea that occurs to you, will have already also occurred to the clever people. But your third idea – only you will have had that one."

Writing and the Tarot Workshop

Tarot-and-creative-writing

On Saturday we had the latest of the Brighton Creative Writing Sessions workshops, on Writing and the Tarot. Ellen and I were very excited as we had a guest tutor for the event, poet and tarot-reader Naomi Foyle.

The tarot has an interesting history as a tool for writers. Italo Calvino described it as a "machine for telling stories", and used it as the basis for his book The Castle of Cross Destinies. (Apparently there was supposed to be a third part of this book, called the Motel of Crossed Destinies, which was never written).

The workshop explored the Major Arcana and Fool's Journey. We played with relating the archetypal symbols on the cards with stories. For me it was most interesting to see how different people interpreted the cards, and the way these symbols could be used, something I want to continue exploring. I was also fascinated to learn that Ted Hughes collection, the Birthday Letters can be analysed in terms of the Major Arcana – more information here. 

I had a fascinating day – thank you to Naomi for running the workshop, and to Jake for providing the space. Ellen and I are now planning 2011's workshops. We have a Top Secret session planned for January, and Writing Brighton in February. Details to follow!

Some links on writing that have excited me recently

  • James Bridle on Chetan Bhagat. I read all of Bhagat's novels on my holiday. They were a more interesting glimpse into India than many of the books I read written by non-Indian journalists. Bhagat is one of the most widely read authors in the world.
  • Russell Davies has posted some of his favourite quotes from the new Coupland novel. The comment he makes introducing them is interesting: "I'm sure I'll read more of Mr Coupland's books but I'd almost rather read his lists or his notes. It seems like he's the perfect novelist to write the something-that's-not-a-novel that must be just around the corner." Having recently read Reality Hunger, I'm starting to see signs of this something-that's-not-a-novel all over the place.
  • Another James Bridle article Birth Pangs of a New Literature: " Authors will keep on writing. They won’t get paid much, but hey, they never did. In fact, there’s a chance they’ll get paid more, if they’re smart, but probably not." 
  • John Scalzi's Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and their students), prompted by the James Frey controversy. Some good points here, but one thing fills me with horror: some Americans are going into six figures of debt for a creative writing program? That sounds insane. More here.
  • An awesome post from Everett True. The comments are worth a read too. "You don’t have to work for them. You don’t have to write for them."
  • Fantastic interview with Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves: "20 pages of architectural names. Ed Kastenmeier recalls this as MZD’s way of telling/showing Ed that the names weren’t meant to be read, that you were not expected to absorb every syllable in this book. Which is why when he was asked to cut them down, he sent back a revision with double the amount of names in it. Ed then understood that some of the passages in House of Leaves were not meant to be studied, at best, a misdirection at worst."
  • Via Tom: Six Word Story, which seems to be an online game similar to the Not for the Faint-Hearted workshops Ellen and I run.
  • Yet another link from James Bridle, who argues that publishers are losing millions to book guilt: "When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one."
  • The cost of a Richard and Judy recommendation: £25,000 and 50p per copy sold
  • One last link, not really on writing… Path sounds like an interesting social network. Like twitter, it adds limitations: only 50 'friends' – focussing on quality of interaction, not quantity. Another limitation is that communication is restricted to photos, with the idea of 'giving' glimpses of moments. There is an interesting article at Wired. Today, I saw Path described as an 'anti-social social network'. Not sure how useful that description is, but this is an interesting category.