Learning To Fly

For the first time ever, your Skewed author appears in photo form! 

I have loved planes since I was a boy. My grandfather - who fought in the Second World War and was an avid airplane buff himself - built little model airplanes for me to play with when I was a kid. From there, I built my own, started flying simulators, and have always had an admiration for aviators. I've also always had an itch to try it for myself. I've flown in giant 747's and MD88's but I've never done it the right way - in a small Cessna.

Yesterday, I finally did it for real.

My girlfriend Emily arranged for me to take a "discovery flight" in Asheville. The flight is designed to give you a taste of what it's like to fly in a small aircraft for the first time and to provide a "sample" for people considering taking lessons. So at ten o'clock yesterday morning, we arrived at Asheville Regional Airport  and eagerly anticipated our first flight.

The weather could not have been better. A bright, beautiful blue sky, sunshine, and wispy clouds waited above us. Our instructor, Anthony, greeted us warmly and then walked us out to the tarmac. It was surreal to step out onto a live, working airport. These are the places you simply never see when you fly a commercial flight. The hangers filled with little Cessna's, Piper's, and sport planes. Pilots milling about - chatting each other up as the morning begins. Mechanics working away, refilling and refitting aircraft. Planes buzzing overhead, and the roar of engines as they taxi nearby - closer to you than you've ever seen them without having a massive pane of airport terminal glass between you and them.

We walked over to our plane, a white Cessna 172: call sign N1173X. Anthony talked us through all of the pre-flight checks. We took fuel samples, looked the leading edge of the wings for any signs of stress fractures, climbed up on the plane and checked the fuel tanks, looked over the flaps and the trim settings. Finally, we opened up the cockpit doors and climbed in.

Sitting at the controls.

The cockpit of a Cessna 172 is so much smaller than you might imagine it. It's also pretty surreal to sit at the controls of an aircraft. In front of you is a myriad of displays. Beneath your feet are the rudder pedals and right in front of you are the controls to the ailerons and elevator.

Anthony started walking me through the steps needed to start the plane: Turn on the main master battery switch. Prime the fuel pump. Push the fuel mixture to full rich. Check the left and right magnetos. And finally, start the engine. I reached down, and turned the key. Out my front window I watched as the propeller started to spin. We had to fire the engine a few times before it caught but when it did, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

I just started an airplane!

We released the parking brake and began to taxi. I was under the impression that I was a passenger for most of this trip. Flipping a few switches and starting an engine is exciting - but I assumed Anthony would do the rest. It just made sense that he would be the one to take us up to altitude and then let me fool around with the controls a little bit. I figured, with my training (which is to say, none at all) that I probably shouldn't be allowed to do much more than that. But, as I would soon find out, this was far more than just a "discovery flight."

Anthony chimed in with what became his trademark of the day: an incredibly relaxed style of instruction: "Okay Robert, you've got the taxi controls. Just rudder left and right as we head out to the run way..." Suddenly, my feet were controlling the plane. My entire body tensed up. I was controlling the aircraft as we rolled down to the runway. After a few minutes, we pulled off to the side of the taxiway - ran the engine up to 1800 RPM to check the spark plugs and the smoothness of the motor; all was well. We pulled back onto the center lane, turned right, and there it was: the massive main runway - landing lights flashing and a broken white line heading to the horizon.

"Alright Robert... hang on just a second here..." Anthony continued and then radioed the tower, "Asheville Approach; Cessna November 1 1 7 3 X-Ray, ready for take off. Request straight out departure runway 1 6..." I could hear the ATC through my headset as the tower replied, " Cessna November 1 1 7 3 X-Ray; Asheville Approach, cleared for takeoff, Runway 1 6. Have a good flight." Anthony turned to me and said what I never expected to hear... "Alright Robert, we're cleared for take off, let's get her off the ground... go ahead and push the throttle to full power... you're taking off for us this morning."

My heart jumped into my throat.

I reached down to my right and pushed the throttle knob in towards the dashboard and felt the engine roar to life. Suddenly, we were moving - rapidly - down the runway. My heart pounded as my mind raced... I had simulated a take off in a Cessna 172 hundreds of times... But nothing prepares you for how it feels to control an aircraft rushing down a runway and feeling it begin to lift off the ground. In what felt like a half a second, I felt the rumble of the tarmac disappear and my stomach hit my feet as the plane lifted off the earth.

Emily cheered from the back seat. Anthony, who had sat the entire time with his hands in his lap, calmly chimed in, "Good job Robert... now let's continue climbing... nose looks good... just hold this angle... very nice..." He reached over and retracted the flaps and I felt the plane adjust to the change in airflow over the wings. I should mention at this point that you are hyper-sensitive to every little bump in the air when you fly a plane for the first time. This isn't a computer game anymore - if you crash a Cessna in real life, there is no reset button. Consequently, I held a death grip on the controls and every time I felt the plane hit a little turbulence, I jumped in my seat. But, after a few minutes, we were at 3,500 feet and I started to relax. The hard part was over.

The Biltmore Estate, seen from the air.
Credit to Emily for snapping this picture.

Anthony pulled up a GPS course for me to follow on my display and I slowly turned right to put us on heading 270. Below us, Asheville stretched out like a patchwork quilt. Downtown - a bustling, eclectic arts center that Emily and I have roamed countless times, looked like a placid, tranquil world painted in miniature. The remarkable thing about flying this way is the closeness you feel to the earth below you. You aren't cruising at 35,000 feet at three hundred miles an hour. Your experience is much closer to that of the early aviators - the pilots of the First World War who described their flights as some of the most peaceful, heavenly experiences of their lives. Cars pass by below, wisps of clouds float beneath you, and the hum of the engine drowns out the sound of the earth. As Cecil Lewis described it, the world becomes a magic screen, slowly scrolling by below.

The other aspect of flying that surprised me was the remarkable amount of concentration it took. I know this is a result of my being a complete novice - but it took everything I had to keep track of our heading, our speed, our altitude, and then try and spot traffic when the call came over the radio. I concluded, quickly, that I would have likely been killed in my first or second mission during World War I. I was terrible at finding other aircraft in the sky - even when their location, heading, and altitude was radioed to me. I don't know how I would have saved myself from being attacked from a corner of the sky I had failed to check. It put my subject into perspective in a hurry.

We flew over the mountain ranges that surround Asheville and then headed back towards the airport. Anthony, who had yet to touch the controls all morning, then said to me, "Alright, so now we're going to land." I looked over and replied, "okay... sounds good." As I started to remove my hands from the controls, he reached over, dropped the throttle and began our decent. Clicking the radio on he called the tower once more, "Asheville Approach, Cessna November 1 1 3 7 X-Ray, descending at 6 5 hundred feet, request permission to land runway 1 6 full stop." And then he turned to me and said, "Okay Robert... you're going to land today..." My response was as quick as it was terrified, "No I'm not..." Emily laughed from the back seat - she had been asking Anthony how far sideways we could turn a Cessna 172... she's a lot braver than I am, and she was a lot more excited at the prospect of me landing the plane than I was."

The nose of the Cessna started to drop. But even I, with only my virtual flying experience to fall back on, could tell something was a little bit off. We were too high and we couldn't get the plane to descend quickly enough. Sure enough, the winds had changed and rather than landing into a 9 knot headwind, we now had a 10 knot tailwind pushing us back up into the sky. Anthony radioed for a go around. We would try again on runway 34 - coming in from the opposite direction. The tower replied back, "Cessna November 1 1 7 3 X-Ray, Asheville Approach, permission to go around granted... new landing on runway 3 4." We headed out towards downtown and turned back towards the airport to try again.

My heart was absolutely in my throat. I had never been so tense at the controls of anything in my life. I felt the wings bobbing back and forth - suddenly, the flight sim jockey who racked up hundreds of kills on the computer was struggling to keep the wings level. Anthony talked me through the entire nerve-wracking process in his usual tranquil voice, "Okay, Robert, you're looking good... wings level... hold her steady... good... now drop the throttle..." He reached over and grabbed the flaps for me. Suddenly I felt the Cessna drag... the air hitting the flaps pulled us upwards and slowed us down rapidly. The stark black runway was rushing up towards us quickly now. I could hear everything - ATC chattering in my ear, the wind rushing over the windscreen, the stall warning siren, and Anthony's voice directing my next hesitant step. "Okay nose down... a little more... a little more... good... okay, nose up... higher... higher..." And for the first time all day, he reached over and gave the controls a slight correction. And then I felt it - the rumble of the ground beneath us once more.

We landed...

It was the most exhilarating experience I've ever had with a machine. I had flown around Asheville for an hour. I had taken off from the earth, flown above it, and landed safely on the ground once more (with a little help at the end from someone who's been doing this for six years.) We taxied back to our parking area and turned the engine off. It had been over an hour since we climbed aboard but it felt like it ten minutes had passed.

Emily was elated. She enjoyed the flight almost more than I did and we were both dying to get back up there and do it again. Anthony debriefed me, and filled out my first logbook entry. Under the take off and landing check boxes there is a fantastic number: 1. I've taken off. I've landed. It's one of the most surreal and rewarding things I've ever done.

I've finally done it for real. The virtual skies I have piloted for nearly two decades finally became a reality yesterday morning. Sure, there were no flak bursts or German pilots patrolling the skies (although Em enjoyed asking me if I wished our Cessna had some machine guns mounted on the wings), but it was more exciting than anything I've ever simulated. And my respect for the men who did this sort of thing for real during the First and Second World Wars has multiplied tremendously. I simply do not know how they did it, and I admire them more than ever.

I'm also suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to change careers and become a pilot.

If you have any interest in flight - even a passing one - you owe it to yourself to have this experience. It costs very little - slightly more than a movie and a fancy dinner out - but the experience you'll have is worth more than the money you'll spend on it. Go out and fly. You won't regret it.

Because no matter how much you've read about it, or simulated it, nothing is better than the real thing.

Finally, I have to say thank you to Emily for the greatest birthday present I've ever received. It was the experience of a lifetime and one that I will never forget.

Celebrating our first flight and showing off the call sign of our Cessna 172.

The Joys of Old

I had a conversation this week with a colleague of mine about video games. Yes, when we're not discussing grant applications or research interests or our latest findings, we revert back to our original and authentic selves: college students.

We were sitting down to a cup of coffee at Starbucks and talking about what kinds of games we play. I said that I had gone back to my PC game collection - my roots, so to speak - and was playing through Fallout 3 again. He asked me what I thought of the first two games and I admitted, sheepishly, that I had never played them.

I touched a nerve.

He plopped his coffee cup down and, nearly bursting at the seams, exclaimed, "what do you mean you never played Fallout or Fallout 2? How does Fallout 3 mean anything to you!? The Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel! These are just... just... things to you! You don't understand just how utterly terrifying the Brotherhood actually is! They're just a bunch of cool guys wearing powered armor! How can you understand the meaning of anything in Fallout 3?! How do you even know yourself?!"

Then came the ultimatum. I mentioned that Good Old Games had Fallout 1 and 2 for $5.99 each. He put down his coffee and implored in an earnest tone: "Go! For Heaven's sake! Go! Buy them! Right now! What are you waiting for? Stop playing Fallout 3 and play the first two games! You'll never understand anything if you don't. Those games are classics!"

The word stuck in my head: Classics. You don't typically think of video games as something that possesses a pedigree, a lineage; a history. But we've reached a point now where there really are classics in this medium of entertainment. And it got me to thinking: what is it about old games that draw us back? Clearly there's a market for them. Nearly every console has older games available for purchase. Entire companies, ones like Good Old Games, are built around the idea that we'll come back to the games we grew up with.

The odd thing is this: if you put me down in front of an old game I never played back when it was new, I feel no real connection to it. It's just an odd collection of bad graphics, clunky controls I never learned, and a story line I don't know. I'm enjoying Fallout 1 and 2 immensely - it's cuing me in on so many of Fallout 3's idiosyncrasies, but I don't think I'm experiencing the same emotional reaction that my friend did - because I never played them when they were new. They feel old. Now, before you bury my blog in hate mail - I don't mean that in a bad way. They run like a classic car - they're great for what they represent and for all they contributed; but they are old.

But half of my computer games - some 70 titles - are just that: Old. Really old! My game collection spans the early 1990s right up to the present. My oldest game is, I kid you not, The Oregon Trail, from 1991. The most recent? Rise of Flight, released in 2010.

I sat down today to my favorite "old" game: Red Baron 3D. Curiously, I don't really remember when I bought most of my newer games. Call of Duty 2, World In Conflict, BioShock... these titles are a blur. I have them, I know I purchased them at some point, but I can't recall when. But I do know, exactly, when I bought Red Baron 3D. It was October of 1998 and I didn't buy it - my mother did - because I was fifteen years old. And it wasn't Red Baron 3D, it was called Red Baron II.

And I played that game non-stop for the next eight years. The following January, in 1999, when we finally got dial-up Internet at our house, I journeyed online and found forums where other players talked about the latest modifications for the game. I downloaded them all. And in the Red Baron community, there was no shortage of things to download. New sound effects, new terrain, new planes, paint schemes, flight models, the list went on and on. I learned much of the computer know-how I have today from installing, tweaking, breaking, and fixing multiple installs of the game.

That was ever so long ago, though.

But not today. Sitting at my computer I fired up this classic flight sim and journeyed back to my younger days. And for twenty minutes, I was utterly enthralled. You might wonder how such an old game can enthrall anyone these days. Just look at these graphics; they're hardly eye-catching. In fact, the game is downright ugly by today's standards. Red Baron II wasn't a particularly pretty game in 1998, and time has not been terribly kind to the old gal. Sure, there were a litany of graphical improvements made by the community, but it's never going to fool anyone into believing it's a modern game.

And I have modern games on my computer. Over Flanders Fields and Rise of Flight are two gorgeous World War I simulators. And yet, this "old gal" of a game (as we called it back in the day) kept me hooked for twenty minutes.

Why?

Because old games - just like favorite old books, music albums, and movies - are more than just art, they are transformative. They take us back to a time and place that no longer exists. And I'm not talking about the Western Front either. I'm talking about being fifteen years old again; sitting in my parents' loft on a school night, and trying to squeeze in one more mission before being ordered to go to bed. It's a similar feeling when I read Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms. When I read through the pages of that literary classic I'm no longer sitting on my couch; in my mind it's suddenly a crisp, sunlit Saturday afternoon in October, oh so many years ago. Red Baron 3D, just like my favorite books, reminds me of being a kid.

It was a happy, wonderful, twenty minutes. My to-do list disappeared. I no longer had a mountain of grading to do. I no longer had a thousand pages to read before tomorrow. I no longer had an iPhone that kept buzzing at me... I'm just back there, playing this wonderful game that held me in its grip for so many years. I'm no longer about to turn thirty; In my mind I'm fifteen, it's the fall of 1998, and I'm a high school kid who is so utterly entranced with a game set in World War I that it will, ultimately, propel me to make the study of the conflict my life's work. Only I don't know any of that yet. I don't know what it is to pay bills, manage a budget, take out loans, worry about your health, survive two near-fatal car accidents, or suffer all of the slings and arrows of the last decade. I'm just... happy... and all I care about is my next mission in this fantastic game.

And that fervent tone in my friend's voice told me that he's had that same experience too - countless times. Only his game was Fallout and its sequel. Mine was an ugly, dusty, completely fantastic old flight simulator that's nearly fourteen years old now. I have a hunch that if you polled Grubbs and Blake, you'd hear about games like Morrowind and Ocarina of Time. And I have no doubt that when they sit down to play these "classic" games, they have the same experience. They aren't working, or married, or burdened with the stresses of adult life - they're fifteen and sixteen years old again; sitting in their favorite chair, in front of their favorite computer, or next to their beloved Nintendo 64; utterly lost in something that was, at the time, completely magical.

Call it sad. Call it pathetic. Call it the perpetuation of the man child. I don't buy that argument for a second. Because truthfully, we all have these experiences. Whether it's climbing back behind the wheel of a car you drove in high school, revisiting a family vacation spot, or hearing a meaningful song on the radio that stops you in your tracks, you've had that experience too.

Ours just happens to be digital.

Formula One 2012: A New Era of Ugly

It appears that Blake over at The Right Wing was on the same wavelength as me this morning. He's already written his post on the new generation of Formula One machines and the jarringly ugly aesthetics they will bring to the grid next month.

Now, before I throw this year's new F1 contenders under the bus (and, believe me, they'd fit), I should clarify that these new and hideous designs are the result of heavy-handed regulation. The F1 aerodynamicists and engineers who have spent hundreds of hours at their digital design boards did not set out with the intent of making the most grotesque generation of racing machines the world has ever known. The FIA - the governing body of F1 - dictates the areas of the car which are allowed to be developed and which are not. Rather than specify a shape, they specify an area of coverage. Think of a Formula One car as a three-dimensional box. Within that box are areas which are off limits and areas which you can shape to your hearts content. Over the years, however, the FIA has constrained those areas more and more in an effort to control speed and performance.

Why? Because F1 engineers are the best in the world. They can do things with a car that shouldn't be physically possible. Cars that generate enough downforce that they could be driven upside down? Cars that can corner at such a violent rate of speed that the driver experiences fighter pilot levels of g-force? Cars that can accelerate up to 150 mph and brake back to 0, all in under ten seconds? Why yes, yes you can. And the FIA, in the name of safety, wants to keep things from getting out of hand.

But the consequences of such increasingly restrictive rules have bequeathed the world a cavalcade of ugly. I give you the 2012 contenders from Caterham, Ferrari, and Force India. I warn you - the goggles will do nothing.

Truthfully, I haven't had the misfortune of staring at a nose like that in over a decade... But I digress. These cars are simply the most jaw-droppingly ugly machines I've ever seen. I understand that F1 goes through generational shifts. The cars of the 1960s were cigar shaped, wingless, nervous death traps with cross-ply tyres and featured the driver sitting on the gas tanks. The cars of the 1970s weren't the prettiest things either (then again, in the 70s, what was?). And the 1980s featured turbo charged behemouths that would just as easily haunt your dreams as fuel your passions. But this? These aren't even scary - they're just ugly. They are powered by wheezy V8 engines - a far cry from the era of V10s and V12s that tore through the air. They perform at a lower ability than their predecessors from the 2004 season. Simply put, they are both underhwelming and unpleasant to look at.

I'm sorry, but is a thirteen year old boy really going to slap one of these up on his bedroom wall? Cars are supposed to be incredible. They are supposed to inspire and excite. As James May so rightly put it, the Lamborghini Countach of the 1980s was tantamount to pornography. Just look at it!

Or this: The McLaren F1 from the 1990s; a car so menacing, so unearthly fast that your pulse quickened just by catching a glimpse of it.

Now, I understand that these are road cars. So I give you this - a little bit of footage of what F1 used to look and sound like not so long ago, in 1997. Look at these cars! They are low slung, menacing, beautifully designed machines. They all look striking and strikingly different. They all attack the problem of going faster from different approaches and they all look good doing it. The curves, the lines, and angles, all look inspiring. And the sounds! Just listen!

Flash forward to the present where we are given a generation of F1 cars that are not only slower, but look like glorified Zamboni's with wings. And, truthfully, that statement is becoming insulting... to Zamboni's everywhere.

F1 is at a crossroads. It is leaving its European roots behind. A sport which used to fly away to races on different continents only three times a year now spends half of the season on the other side of the world from where the sport began. The historic venues of F1: tracks like Spa, Monza, Imola, Hockenheim, the Nurburgring, Magny Cours, and the A1 Ring are fading fast. Of that list, Spa and Monza are the only two that make yearly appeareances. The others have either been put on a semi-annual rotation or cut altogether in favor of tracks in the Middle East, Malaysia, China, and India. The sport is now global, but has it not also lost some of its soul?

The cars are no longer really the cutting edge of motorsport, either. Formula One of the 1990s was the pinnacle of Motorsport. The newest technologies created for the car cut their teeth in F1. Paddle shifting, traction control, electronic stability control - all of the toys that come on your Lexus and your Mercedes-Benz were born and baptized in Formula One. Not so any more. In the name of cost restrictions (an ironic idea for a sport that spends hundreds of millions of dollars flying to far-flung locales every fortnight), F1 cars no longer have the kinds of advances you'd find on a mid-range road car. F1 seems confused; torn between the public relations pressures of being "green" in this era of global warming and being the necessarily messy edge of Motorsport development. That confusion shows in this generation of F1 machines; their very design is now endemic of a sport that seems to be losing its identity and its spirit of innovation.

For every box nose, flat profile, and lackluster corner of these new machines, one can see a great sport struggling to understand its purpose, and remember what it used to represent. A sport which yearns for freedom - for drivers to say what they think, designers to push the envelope, for the greatest machines in the world to race on the greatest tracks in the world - now finds itself restrained by its governing body; the chains that bind it growing tighter with every new season. Perhaps a look at the sport's past through the eyes of its greatest driver might help.

Did you feel that? That was the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. That was the feeling of goosebumps crawling across your skin. That was the feeling of being awed by something remarkable.

And that is what Formula One so desperately needs to bring back.

The Great Blogger Conversation

Blake's 30th birthday came and went earlier this week. So, first things first: Happy Birthday my friend! From all accounts, Blake - the resident writer and creator of The Right Wing - had a great night out. And as the evening wound down we caught up on the phone for a few hours. After all, Blake - along with nearly every other friend I have from college - is back in Georgia while I'm away at UT. We discussed the usual, life, politics, formula one, and writing. Interestingly enough, we talked about my two Lenovo posts and expressed our surprise at two things: one, that the posts actually worked and two, that we actually have an audience!

We looked at our Blogger stats and found that The Skewed View had recently passed 10,000 hits. Mind you, these stats started tracking back in March of last year when Skewed was resurrected from the grave. I can only imagine how many views it had before it met its untimely demise in December of 2008. Blake's efforts over at The Right Wing have not gone unnoticed either, racking up several thousand views as well (I can't remember the exact number Blake, so I went with a general and vague measurement). We were amazed. People actually read what we write! It was also inspiring to know that, at least on some level, our work was noticed, and it has re-fired our motivation to keep creating new content.

We also discovered something else. As the evening wore on, we wound up going back through our old material and reading each other's posts out loud; talking about what worked and what didn't, but mostly just laughing our collective asses off at the truly bizarre, off the wall things we wrote. Dig back through the Skewed archives and you'll find some truly bizarre creations. Fred's posts alone account for some of the most vibrant, off-color, and offensive material here. Then there's the innumerable posts that culminate with this famous picture of what I kept calling an Ostrich (which is actually an Emu that I have now named Ostrich the Emu as a way of covering up my mistake all those years).

Thanks Ostrich. It also was impossible not to notice something else: the change in tone over the years. We were younger back then - in our early to mid twenties - and we were so much less cautious about what we wrote. It was as if we never gave a second-thought to the fact that anything we published here would live on the Internet for anyone to come by and read. We were writing without a net, and it shows. Some of the things we said are jaw-droppingly provocative. Referring to drivers as walking Darwin Awards, talking about rounding up and executing stupid people, flaming anyone who ticked us off, and speaking with a confidence we didn't rightly possess in the first place - but seemed to pull off well anyway. Like Wile E. Coyote, we ever looked down, and the material kept floating. By the end of the night, after reading countless posts where we threw around language like just so much live ammunition, we couldn't help but wonder if it was possible to get it back. To un-remember our audience and write for ourselves again in this most public of venues.

Skewed turns six this July. It's remarkable to imagine that a blog designed to keep me busy for a few weeks back in the summer of 2006 has spawned hundreds of posts (we're nearing 400 of them... again...). We'll keep on writing and hopefully, both Blake and I will be able to remember what it was like to let loose and fling our ideas and our language around with a little more reckless abandon - the kind we used to use back when we started this journey.

In the meantime, thanks for staying with us all of these years. I think we'll be here for a long time to come.

PS: Fred says hi...

The Skewed Historian

Time for a shameless plug. As part of a graduate seminar project, we were asked to start a blog. I know, it's adorable, isn't it? So, as a way of directing a little more foot traffic to my new academic endeavor, I'll leave this here: as part of a "spin off" of sorts for The Skewed View, I now present - temporarily at least - The Skewed Historian!

In all seriousness, The Skewed Historian will tackle the more challenging questions of what it means to teach history in the 21st century. What do we expect from our students? What do we cover? What gets left out of a survey class? How do we find meaningful ways to provide our students with the knowledge they require and a skill set to make use of it? The list goes on and on. So go here if these questions perk your interest: rennieatutk.wordpress.com. Over the coming weeks you'll see more posts added as we attempt to solve these problems and more. Hope you enjoy.

We'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

It's Deja Vu All Over Again

This just in: video chat tools like Apple's Facetime is not a replacement for genuine for real human interaction - especially for children. Thank you, Captain Obvious. This little gem comes to us from CNN, who reported this morning that a recent study of children ages eight to twelve show that a propensity for multitasking creates socially stunted people. And by multitasking, I mean the unending, ADD addled cycle of checking text messages, Facebook, email, and back to text messages again; the kind of behavior that makes anyone over thirty want to hit someone with a blunt object. Of course, this begs the question: why in the hell are eight year old kids texting and checking Facebook? Do kids even play anymore? Do they go outside? Doesn't a kid deserve the right to just sit in the yard and play with a stick? Do kids even play with sticks anymore? Why are we engineering children to be little adults before they've even learned how to ride their bicycles?

But that's a whole different rant for a different post. Back to those socially awkward, annoying little text-a-holics and why their digital toys are screwing them up for life...

Mind you, five minutes spent with an average high schooler would have told me this much. But now there's a study to confirm it; just in case you had any doubt that the shuffling masses of pod people bumping into you at the mall as they stare blankly at their glowing rectangular addictions wasn't already a hint. The study confirms that girls in the aforementioned age bracket of eight to twelve who spent their time multitasking were less socially adept later in life. That, indeed, they were socially stunted: unable to carry themselves in conversation without high levels of anxiety and didn't understand what was considered polite and not (you know, like texting every five minutes while in the middle of a conversation with the real person standing in front of them). In short, multitasking and a lack of genuine human interaction is - at least according to this incredibly brief summary of a study on CNN's website - creating a generation of hyper-active, mal-contented pod people.

It seems like we've been here before.

And indeed, we have. Stretch back, way back, in the Skewed archives and you'll find our second post was on just such a phenomenon. Has It Really Come To This was a piece I wrote about a twenty-four year old woman who spent more of her social life online than off. Yes, even way back in 2006 (surely not! no one was alive then!) people like this twenty-four year old business woman (who would now be thirty), checked in on Facebook, had dates on Match.com, checked her Dodgeball messages, and plugged into a litany of other (likely now defunct) social networking tools to keep in touch - without ever touching someone in the first place.

I had this to say on the matter back then: It's disturbing, to be honest. A 24 year old woman, (my age) - young, successful, and obviously a university student at some point, prefers the social interaction of "poking" "winking" or "pinging" over actually sitting down and having a cup of coffee with someone? Mind you, I have no fault with her, to each their own, but have human beings become so socially uncomfortable that they would rather have a machine do it for them? We're quickly evolving into a world filled with automated spam, self check-out lines, ATM's, and a host of "networking" sites to fill the void left by a complete lack of human contact during our days.

And it still is. I'm a firm believer that the greatest gift you can give someone is your time, your attention, and most importantly, your present-ness. Picking up the phone to call someone, meeting them for coffee, spending time with them - these are the things that make human interaction genuine, real, and rewarding. Facebook pokes, text messages, and the lot are the filler for the good stuff. And the problem is, most people are living off of the filler.

What makes today's story so much more disturbing than that New York Times article from six years ago is this: the twenty-four year old knew and remembered what life was like before the digital age. She knew that this wasn't exactly "normal" but it was the new thing, and she embraced it. The eight to twelve year old kids mentioned in today's article do not, and will never know of a time when this wasn't "normal." For the generation born since 1990, the Internet is like electricity and running water. The concept of Googling something is second nature. Facebook, text messaging, blogs... these things are as naturally occurring as the air they breathe. It is simply unfathomable to them that this can be perceived as anything other than normal. We (meaning the older generations) are the freaks - not them.

History provides some comfort in the knowledge that nearly every generation experiences this. I have no doubt in my mind that the generation born prior to the ubiquity of electricity were perpetually mystified and slightly afraid of it. In fact, Benjamin Harrison was the first president to have electricity in the White House - but both he and his wife were too afraid of electrocution to touch the light switches. Humanity will learn to grow and adapt around these new tools. Humanity always has. We've been here before. Indoor plumbing, the printing press, the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, the desktop computer. In many ways, this is nothing new.

But while we may have encountered transformative technologies before, no other innovation before it has allowed human beings to interact so vividly without actually interacting. And we are, by our very nature, social creatures. This new toolbox of technologies fundamentally alters human behavior. So the question remains, and it is an unnerving one: Will we harness these new tools - as we have in the past - to improve our lives and better express our inherently social human nature? Or will this new, utterly transformational paradigm rewire our internal programming forever?

Only time will tell. Meanwhile, be prepared to have a lot more teenie-boppers running into you at the mall because they simply cannot look up from their phones.

Damn kids...

One Little Picture

It's amazing what one little picture can do. The image on the left denotes, in the simplest terms possible, the power of disruptors on society. Disruptors are anything that upset the norm; the status quo, and fundamentally change things. I saw this image on Facebook last week, and after giving it a good chuckle, I felt like sharing it over on my wall; or timeline, or whatever the hell Facebook calls it these days.

And oh boy, did it ever get a reaction. Dozens of irate, passionate, even angry comments began filling the space below my post. People I didn't even know and weren't friends with started commenting and flinging charged rhetoric back and forth on my page. By the way, I had no idea that such a thing could even happen but there they were, the angry denizens of the internet previously unknown to me were calling my post stupid, silly, and over simplified.

What makes this even more curious to me is that this was the silliest, lowest common denominator thing I've posted in ages. In the past week I had shared videos of flight simulations, links to photo galleries of Berlin following World War II, and comments on some good music. And yet, in this sea of semi-intellectual wares, it was the digital fart joke of the Internet that suddenly had people flocking to my page to raise a stink.

So what made this photo so inflammatory? Obviously, the unabashed bluntness of the message is going to raise more than a few eyebrows. But there is more going on here than meets the eye. After all, we see inflammatory things on the Internet all the time, and yet, this image drew a heated response. Perhaps it isn't even the men themselves, but what they represent and what they disrupt, that puts us all so ill at-ease, raises our blood pressure, and allows us to act like oh so many digital jackasses on someone's unsuspecting Facebook profile.

First we have Julian Assange, mysterious founder and chief architect of WikiLeaks - a website devoted to divulging information, at all costs. Indeed, he is the oft-maligned breaker of corporate and government secrets and is frequently reviled in the press as a sort of Batman villain - with the requisite hairstyle to boot. He caught an incredible amount of flak a few years ago following the WikiLeaks' release of U.S. Military and Diplomatic cables regarding the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The press subsequently crucified him - implying the release of such information endangered U.S. service personnel. Ever since, he's been a proverbial lightning rod for debates over privacy on the internet and what is considered secret and not. He is a disruptor of the highest order - upending everything from Fortune 500 corporations to nothing less than the United States armed forces - and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

Then we have Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, of course, is the creator and founder of Facebook - the largest social networking website on earth and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet. The site is also a veritable treasure trove of personal information - people's birthdays, favorite books, movies, television shows, music artists. More than that, Facebook now tells us where people are, where they eat, shop, sleep, vacation, who they date, who they marry, who they divorce, their kids... the list goes on and on. To say that Zuckerberg has been a lightening rod in the debate over privacy would also be an understatement. Facebook's muddled privacy policies and over-engineered implementation have caught the ire of everyone from the EFF to the mainstream media. His often curt demeanor and difficult speaking style has left him labeled as a social miscreant - a fact made no better by the release of a feature film entitled The Social Network, which cemented these impressions in the minds of the public. He is a disruptor of the highest order - upending the existing paradigm of what the Internet is, altering human social interaction, attracting lots of interest (not to mention revenue) from Fortune 500 corporations - and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

Yet, it is the perception and subsequent judgement of these two giants of the Internet Privacy Revolution that seem to spark so much controversy. And, truthfully, Assange and Zuckerberg operate from two wildly different paradigms. Assange seeks transparency at all costs - even if they come with a body count. He fervently believes that the era of government secrets is - or should be - over. As President Woodrow Wilson argued for transparency in diplomatic communications - the result of the collisional train-wreck which proceeded the First World War, Assange now seeks to drive this desire to its logical end - complete and total transparency. If the United States government is doing something that needs to be kept under wraps, then the United States government probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place. That same measure of transparency applies to everything from your local university to Fortune 500 companies to the IMF and the WTO. And, as goes without saying, such a policy of transparency tends to go over poorly with people in power. As such, Assange has, either foolishly or courageously, made himself a martyr over this issue. He will ultimately live and die by the new standards he has unleashed upon the world.

Zuckerberg, if judged by his company's actions, is a completely different animal. He seeks transparency on the part of the user, but not the company. Facebook regularly rolls out new "features" without feedback from its customer base. The company frequently caught flak for resetting their users privacy settings without their knowledge or permission. And Zuckerberg is not out to create a free and transparent society - he's out to map the social graph of humanity - and get insanely rich in the process. The results of Facebook are nearly as disruptive as Assange's WikiLeaks releases - albeit on a completely different and far more subtle level. We live in a society now transformed. Smartphones now come with little blue Facebook buttons hard wired on their shiny plastic cases. Every website on the net is now linked to Facebook. Internet start ups desperately seek Facebook recognition the way their predecessors desperately sought Google's recognition a decade ago. Facebook is also unusually ambitious. It seeks far more than to merely link people - it seeks to be the portal to the Internet and, ultimately, the Internet itself. It's a far more subtle approach than the sledgehammer effect of a WikiLeaks press release, but its no less disruptive to the net and society as a whole. And with half a billion users and counting, Facebook's sheer girth will alter the paradigm of privacy in ways we can't even fully appreciate yet.

But back to that one little picture. Even without these men present in the flesh, their mere iconography, accompanied by two oversimplified captions of their intent and their subsequent place in society, was enough to fire off a flame war the likes of which I haven't seen in years.

So why this picture?

Because these two men and, more importantly, what they represent, make people uncomfortable. We, as human beings, do not like transparency. We cringe at the thought of everyone knowing everything about our lives - our dark secrets, the websites we visit when no one else is around, the spouses we cheat on, the tax documents we fudge, the red lights we run... the litany of grimy, less-than-upstanding things we do. The mere thought of these details becoming public knowledge is unsettling. Its the sort of life-baggage that keeps people up at night. Extrapolate that unease to business and government secrets and it becomes a far greater fear. We also don't like admitting our complicit surrender of so much personal information to a young, gawky kid in his twenties who just happens to run one of the biggest websites on earth. In short, both Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg remind us, painfully even, that our understanding of privacy in the twenty first century no longer applies. The old paradigm is dead. Information is no longer safe or sacred. It can be surrendered or stolen, given or liberated, and ultimately, it is no longer truly ours to control, if it ever was.

They might represent two vastly different paradigms, but they ultimately become two sides of the same disruptive coin. The question now is, which side do you find more palatable? Because, if it hasn't already been made clear, neither Assange nor Zuckerberg, nor the ideas they represent, are going anywhere anytime soon.