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It’s more complicated than that

January 13th, 2012

My daughter is four years old. The other day, as I was leaving the house, she asked me why I needed to go to work. “Why can’t you stay home?” she said.

My simple answer was, “Dear, you see, I need to go to work so I can make money, so we can have nice things and eat nice meals.” She accepted that answer as truth.

What I didn’t say was that I enjoy going to work. That there are days when going to work is a break from the kids, as much as I love them, and that while I would certainly rather spend the day with her and her brother, there are times when I need to get out and think at an adult level.

I didn’t mention that I don’t work for the money, but for the challenge – for the drive, for the thrill of making things, for the rush that comes with collaborating with other people.

I just said I was going to make money. It was the easy answer. Because I didn’t have the time – nor did she have the attention – for me to tell her truth: that it’s much much more complicated than that.

Deforestation

If there’s one thing that fuels today’s grab for pageviews, it’s opinions. Hard ones. This or that. Nothing in between. Nothing that veers into the hazy grey field of compromise.

“Summarize that,” they say. “Give me the bullet point version,” they demand. Time is of essence. Boil it down so it no longer needs thought.

So when we talk about whether the New York Times should be more vigilant in their fact checking, or whether yoga will cause you irreparable harm, we’re predisposed to boil it down to the most simple argument. I know I do this. We all do, in some ways.

Maybe it’s not our fault. Maybe we’ve been taught to believe that the ability to create concise descriptions of complicated things is a sign of success when. Really, it’s the opposite. You’ve succeeded when you can explain a complex subject without losing the nuance. I know: that’s hard to do. So we summarize. So we cut corners. We ignore the complexity.

It’s not a matter of missing the forest for the trees – it’s that we’re cutting down all of the trees and wondering where the forest went.

On Argument

A year and a half ago, during the 2010 South Dakota Festival of Books, I watched Michael Hart – the late founder of Project Gutenberg – and Michael Dirda – Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic – present a panel on “Reading in the Digital Age.”

As one might expect, Hart spoke at length about how the printed book was dead, that all writing should be done digitally for the benefit of mass consumption and for those who may not be able to afford a printed tome. Dirda, on the other hand, spoke about the necessity of aesthetics, of the tactile nature of holding a book in your hand, of the feeling of being that you cannot recreate in an e-reader.

Both made some good points. But the title of the panel is misleading. This presentation was no more about reading in the digital age than it was about koala mating habits. Where we expected some sort of solid discourse on where print vs. digital may eventually compromise, we instead received a kind of ribald sniping. It was a battle between two opposing viewpoints, both refusing to admit middle ground, incapable of giving an inch.

While the answer lie somewhere in the middle of the pitch, these two men fought over which side of the field to enter.

Respecting Complexity

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity — both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

Erin Kissane, “What I Learned About the Web in 2011″ via A List Apart

My experience at the South Dakota Festival of Books is no different than any experience one might find watching cable television, or at a political debate, or when discussing which Led Zeppelin album is the best. We’ve been trained to take a side and dig in for battle.

When we go to battle intellectually, we find comfort in absolutes. They afford us a bit of security. There are no holes to be poked in our theories.

Part of the challenge of art and science and rhetoric is in finding the nuances; there is no topic worth discussing that doesn’t hold some grey area, and there is no grey area that is worth ignoring. But grey areas? They’re hard. So we ignore them. And that’s how misinterpretation seeps into our lives.

Naming Things

Take, for example, the industry in which I work: web design, development and strategy. For the past several years, people have tried to put together a simple, concise description of content strategy – what is it, and how do we quickly explain it to our bosses? We understand that there’s a need for that description in a business sense, but our answer is often lacking in nuance. We trade length for clarity; we discard the messy details to gain a certain level of buzzworthiness.

Truth is, content strategy means different things to different people. What’s more, THAT’S OKAY. Just as “web development” means different things to different people, we still have freedom to interpret our work in a way that makes sense to us.

So we stick with “content strategy” – an awkward word that barely captures the extent of what we do. But we’re not alone in this: language is hard, and though we struggle to assign simple words to complex arrangements, and though they may seem trite and inaccurate, oftentimes it’s the best we can do.

Communication isn’t perfect. Again: THAT’S OKAY.

This is not an industry-specific thing, either. Ask someone to explain the scientific method. Depending on their field of expertise, you may hear several variations of the base process. Ask someone to explain something with a clear purpose and structured set of rules – baseball, for instance. Ask a baseball fan. Ask a baseball historian. Ask someone with no connection to the game. To some, it’s a game. To others, it’s a past-time. To the haters, it’s a distraction.

Black. White.

Words allow us to communicate. But they also fail us, in that we’re driven to compress theories that should, in fact, become more robust. We’re taught to say more with less, to edit and edit until there’s nothing left to chance, to push things into a smaller box. So we cut the non-crucial elements. And we lose the nuance. And we wonder why this seemingly complicated theory has been boiled down to a Cliff’s Notes version – all solution, no reasoning.

Sure, most things should be said in fewer words. But there are a lot of things that should be said in more.

We’re challenged to understand the future in as complete a way as possible. To shy away from absolutes, and to embrace the grey area, charging in full speed and making sense of the fray. There are discoveries there. There is truth. There is completeness.

We can’t take one side or the other – not in good faith – without understanding that, regardless of the subject, it’s often more complicated than that.

War is good. War is bad. It’s more complicated than that.

We should be liberal. We should be conservative. It’s more complicated than that.

We should fight to stay neutral, and we should always look at all angles of a subject, and we should stop trying to sum up incredibly complex processes and concepts and feelings into simple, single-serving soundbites. We should run to the middle and be implicit in our embrace.

Except, let’s be honest.

It’s more complicated than that.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Content Strategy, Journalism, On..., Politics, Technology, Words

The things we make

January 10th, 2012

I believe that, as humans, we are unique from most species in that we are driven to make things for aesthetic alone. We don’t just make things because we need them, but because they make us feel good. Because they are interesting.

We don’t write blog posts, or make interesting websites, or paint or build works of art because they will help us survive, but because we’re driven to find the beauty in life. Even in the case of life’s staples, we embellish the simple act with art.

For example, we don’t learn and perfect artisan bread-making because we feel the need to nourish ourselves, but because we are fascinated by the art and culture of bread, and because we want something more than just another loaf of Wonder bread. Otherwise, we’d just throw bread, flour and water together and eat eat eat.

We make things because it’s fun. Because it’s there. Because we’re human.

The rub, then, becomes not “should we make something?” but “what should we make?” It’s here that we begin separating from each other, where our tastes diverge and our identities are built. Some find a passion and focus. Others are content with consuming, feeding off of the things others make. And some (those poor few) never land on anything. They bounce from one thing to another. They are the anti-polymath: the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none character in life’s production cycle.

There’s something to be said about letting things go and understanding that we can’t do all of the things. I’ve never been able to do that. Maybe you’ve never been able to do it either. What it means is that, while others are making and perfecting their passion, we’re busy dipping our hand into every bucket.

Maybe that’s okay. But it all seems a little manic, to me.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying, “Hey, look. In addition to the photos and the blogs and the industry-speak and the record collection and the new running habit and the beer making and the family (the family, by the way, are the only thing I feel I’m doing at full strength anymore, which is glorious in its own right) I decided to give you this.”

“It’s a podcast.”

“It’s something I made. Me and two of my friends.”

“It’s probably crude and definitely low-production and certainly more of an inside joke that it means to be, but it’s a start.”

“It might be funny. We don’t know. But we made it.”

That’s all that matters, sometimes. We made this thing. For us. And for you. (But mostly for us.)

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: On..., Podcast

I lie to my kids, every Christmastime, because I’m supposed to

December 29th, 2011

Santa isn’t real, but don’t tell my kids. They still believe in him, like the little fools they are.

That sounds harsh, and it is. But that’s how it feels when, willingly, I continue to convince my kids that the presents they got for Christmas came from some dude that broke into their house, some guy that was initially set up as a representation of sainthood – Saint Nicholas! – and has morphed into a ninja-like spectre of gift-giving.

Saint Nicholas of Myra gave gifts to the poor, devoted his life to his religion, and became the patron saint of children, sailors and the local pawn shop. St. Nicholas of the Netherlands is a character of folklore. In Germany, St. Nicholas is an approximation of Odin, a god in human clothing not unlike Jesus himself. These stories have been twisted, adapted and changed from their original celebration of giving, to the point that Santa has become a THING; no longer a representation of charity, Santa is now How We Get Presents.

We all know that. But my kids don’t. My kids don’t understand that Santa represents an abstract thought, just as they don’t understand that Dora the Explorer represents growth through following directions and learning language. There’s one difference, though: my kids don’t think Dora the Explorer is a real person.

So we lie to our kids for tradition’s sake. There’s nothing that we’ve given to our children that we haven’t want to claim ourselves, but there’s this unspoken rule that, yes, THIS gift is from Santa. Yes, that Santa. Yeah. The fat guy who ate the cookies.

It’s so ingrained that we don’t feel icky about it. But this year, I did. I felt downright AWFUL about pretending there was a Santa, that I took advantage of our four-year-old’s trust and our two-year-old’s naivety by keeping the charade up. I hated it. But I did it. And I’m questioning whether I do it again.

If you were raised in a typical Christian-based house as a kid, you remember the time you found out Santa wasn’t real. You remember it because it was one of the first times you realized your parents lie. That they’d lied to your face, for years, about the person who brought the gifts. You either accepted it for what it was, or you were sad and Christmas was ruined for the year, but one thing always remained: you wondered what else your parents lied about.

What else is simply a facade? What else should I question, refuse to trust, and all of that Rage Against the Machine worry.

Dramatic, yes. But Kerrie and I have made a point not to lie about things to our children. Outside of occasional lies of omission, we’ve done a decent job – as decent job as one can with two inquisitive whippersnappers wandering around.

But SANTA. Oh. Santa, Santa, Santa.

Next year? I hope Santa has gone away.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Isaac, On..., Sierra

Sierra and the caterpillar

October 18th, 2011

On Saturday, we found a caterpillar. A yellow caterpillar, crawling up the side of the south-side Target, impossible to miss, reckless to ignore.

“Sierra! Isaac! Come check this out!”

Sierra fell in love, and we brought it home. We put it in a plastic bug carrier that she had received for one of her birthdays. We gave it two leaves and a bit of grass. And we watched as it tried to crawl the sides.

It never ate those leaves, and it never touched the grass. Last night, it died.

You and I know that this caterpillar could have died from any number of things. The cold, the new location, some sickness or old age or whatever. Nothing to do with us; in fact, nothing to do with anything other than the random cycle of life.

If everything had gone according to plans, this caterpillar would have turned into a moth. Instead, it died.

Sierra asked about it, and we were blunt. We tried to explain that it was probably sick before we got it, and that there would be more caterpillars in the future, and that we should be happy that we gave it a good home until the day it died, as if we were some kind of moth hospice and the kitchen counter was some kind of converted hospital bed.

Tears. All of them, at that moment. Tears until there couldn’t be any tears left.

Explaining death isn’t that easy. It shouldn’t be. It should be something that’s felt, not explained away as a cold scientific fact. This encounter with death was Sierra’s first conscious brush with the concept; there will be many more, and it will never get easier. Never.

That’s okay.

So Kerrie took Sierra out to the garden. One trowel, one clump of dirt, a hundred or so tears. And there Alicia the Caterpillar lies, in our garden, next to a dying tomato plant, surrounded by worms and soil and compost. Sierra is convinced those worms will take care of her favorite caterpillar in the entire world, and we’re not dissuading her.

She came back inside, read a few books, and began to let it go.

She hasn’t gotten over it yet, though.

That’s okay, too.

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: On..., Sierra

Let’s go make some great things.

October 5th, 2011

This isn’t about Steve Jobs, except that it is. It’s not about technological advances or sleek design or Toy Story 3, because things like that would have been created eventually, by someone, if not in their current form then at least in a form we’d recognize.

This is about us.

Within minutes of the news of Steve Jobs’ death, Twitter exploded in an outpouring of solidarity. Sports sites posted the story. The President made comments. We all cared in a way that we never thought we would, and a mixture of respect and inevitability pushed any glimmer of snark from the room.

People began tweeting a corporate logo. Speaking large about passion and creativity and death. Making grand claims. Reminiscing. All for a billionaire businessman who none of them had met. During a time when we bemoan the rich and claim our place in the nation’s 99%, we stopped to salute a man who was richer than most and who until recently had helmed the most valuable company in the nation.

Except this time, it felt different.

Because this isn’t about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs himself wasn’t even about Steve Jobs; after Apple’s phoenix-like rise, Steve Jobs shifted from a normal human to a symbol of impossibility-made-possible.

This IS about passion. This IS about creativity. This IS about death. This is about recognizing innovation, seeing it at work, hoping that the impossible will continue being so damned possible. This is about the aura of creation and the lives we now lead in a shrinking world; barriers broken not through force but through the optimism of modern technology – that bravado that says, “Sure, why the hell not, of COURSE that can be done.”

Today, a man died. We are sad about that and for his family, of course, and we should be. His company has been built to continue on, and the things he’s created will continue to work, and we will spend a week or so wondering how things will change before understanding that nothing’s going to change. We’re all going to continue moving forward. We’re all going to see things we never thought possible and we’re going to marvel at them. Most of all, we’re never going to stop wondering what else can be done. Just as he taught us. Just as the space program taught us. Just as our childhood counselors taught us.

Want a legacy? There it is.

What did people say when Thomas Edison died? Or Marconi? Benjamin Franklin? Eli Whitney? What do you say when someone who you never met, but whose work you touch every single day, stops being a part of our world?

You can say thank you, I guess.

Or, you can strive to make things better. Because this death, and this outpouring, and this sudden swell in solidarity, is not about Steve Jobs. It’s about seeing someone we admire suddenly go away and understanding how short life can be, and how much can be done. You may not like his products, or his attitude, or his politics, but you can’t bemoan the guy’s drive to improve, his inability to waffle and his undying quest to make things perfect in a world that’s long since given up on perfect.

It was never about the products. It was always about the ability to package passion and drive and beauty in a way that exceeded the technology within. It was a conquering of spirit that went beyond a device. The things are just things. It’s the will to improve and stay relevant that shaped our love for Steve.

All that being said, there’s still one thing will never be conquered: time. Even through decades of remission and treatment and healthy living, time was always there.

Steve knew it. And now, we know it as well.

So let’s go make some great things. And use that time while we have it.

Caring is sharing

August 29th, 2011

Everyone’s given their thoughts about Steve Jobs, and now we can focus on the fact that Apple is still a company and still making cool things that we all spend lots of money on and they’ll end up doing just fine without him.

That being said, I loved Faruk Ateş’ take on Steve. As a former Apple employee, he offered a list of Steve Job Moments, which included this gem:

While by no means a pleasant memory, it’s one I’ll never forget just the same. It was a few months after MobileMe’s launch, and I’d just joined that product group two months before it. We were all called in for a meeting with Steve, who chewed out the entire department without raising his voice more than once.

I forget what specific things he said during that meeting that struck me so hard, but they had nothing to do with MobileMe’s problems. They simply made it clear how much Steve cared about Apple, about great products, and about all the people at Apple who work their asses off night and day, all to deliver their best work time and time again. Steve seemed personally offended, for himself and on behalf of the rest of Apple, by this one department’s failure to deliver. More so even than he was upset over the tarnished reputation, it felt that our failure was taken as a lack of respect, and that offended him even more.

Whether this is how Steve felt about it I’ll never know. What I do know is that I walked out of there not just agreeing with everything he’d said, but also that, were I ever to run a company, I would make sure to care that damn much about everyone and everything in it.

The biggest thing to take away from this is, indeed, Steve Job cared, and that’s one of the more important things any of us can do to make something work. It isn’t how hard we work, or how much money we put into it, but that we care, damn it.

When we care, we continue working regardless of how hard things get. We treat our co-workers and employees with respect – and we hold them accountable. We hold ourselves accountable. And we foster trust.

When we care, we see things through, and others follow. This anecdote was a good reminder of that.

I talked to my grandmother last night

August 12th, 2011

I talked to my grandmother last night. It was fantastic. She sounded great; full of life, chatty, her voice refusing to betray the fact that she’s 72.

We talked about the kids’ birthday parties, and about Sierra’s shopping spree. We talked about buying ridiculously expensive land in Wyoming, about how the local celebrities weren’t paying their taxes in Jackson, about how if Grandpa were still around he’d be buying defaulted land like it was going out of style.

We talked about the back roads in Jackson, about my job, Kerrie’s job, the kids and how fast they’re growing. We talked about my father’s health issues. We talked about how my brother is going to be a senior in high school.

We talked about how funny it was that my mom kept trying to call her cell phone instead of her home phone, and how my grandmother doesn’t really use her cell phone anymore.

We talked for a long time.

What we didn’t talk about was her health.

We didn’t talk about how she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. About how scared that made her, and how she eventually came to terms with it and realized that there’s nowhere to go but forward, that living life being scared of cancer was no life to live at all.

We didn’t talk about how she had her third treatment, and how it was the worst she’s experienced, and how she’s often too tired to do much but sit in her room and watch Court TV, but damn it that hasn’t stopped her from entertaining and inviting people into her home and continuing a long tradition of being the most welcoming person in Teton Valley.

We didn’t talk about that.

Because my grandmother has lived through seven decades of Wyoming winters, through the slow and inevitable passing of her brothers and sisters, through the loss of her own soul mate – my grandfather – to cancer (fucking cancer) and the loss of lucidness that came with it.

She raised two children on her own for years while my grandfather was in the army, and she helped run a small engine shop and a gas station and whatever else my grandfather felt driven to do.

My grandmother is strong. She’s going to be okay.

So we didn’t talk about it. And I think I’m okay with that.