Sunday, September 04, 2011
The problem of envisioning future tech: anachronisms (PowerPoint and texting) in "A Visit from the Goon Squad"
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Tech notes
- Chapter 12, Alison’s SLIDE journal (she’s aged 12, retorts to her mom Sasha’s “I mean writing a paper.” “Ugh! Who even uses that word?”) is told in Powerpoint, including charts, graphs, callouts--basically everything PPT does except animation and slide transitions...because the slides are in a made-of-paper book. You hold the book sideways and read the text top to bottom, often guided by arrows, though some slides are non-linear. It’s an anachronism of the future. People spurn Powerpoint now: hard to imagine it will be a thing in 2020. Hard to imagine people will write at all. Voice recognition is coming in now--I prefer it in my Google app because it works so well and is effortless compared to typing out my search term. People have Skype on their phones now and video calling and god knows what other apps that are becoming widely used.
- Text language - “U hav sum nAms 4 me?” “hEr thA r” “GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk.” (note cap for long vowels--too many extra keystrokes--plus punctuation). Same as above. People will just speak to text.
- Looping Pauses - Lincoln (somewhat autistic), Sasha and Drew’s son, documents pauses in rock songs, then loops them to create his own music of pauses. Note his comments on “Foxey Lady” about Jimi Hendrix breathing in the pause:
Yesterday, while listening to Reggie Watts vids on YouTube, serendipitously, I read about Everyday Looper for iPhone in a comment. Watch Reggie Watts with a keyboard and his live sounds (“big ass purse” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g1vEXz5BvA&feature=related; him laying tracks on stage singing “cat song”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01IkYtk4GVs&feature=related; and using Everyday Looper on a Sirius radio interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csw3LrmHkUg&feature=related. For a demo on Everyday Looper watch this other guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW5ZcjQ3I10&feature=colike. Seriously, skip the tutorial to hear his music at the end. - Diagrams - I laid awake last night thinking of drawing a diagram of the book’s characters and how they connect to each other. I’d looked for an index at the end of the novel--like the glossary I was surprised to find at the end of A Clockwork Orange after I’d already figured out through context and repetition Burgess’s hooligan slang. You begin each new chapter in Egan’s book like a time machine traveller--it takes a little while to figure out the who, when, and where. Characters pop in and out so that you have to wrack your brains (or go back and reread) to remember where you read about them before. The effect is like a giant jigsaw. So as I was thinking about making this diagram, I decided to Google to check whether anyone else’d had the same idea and I found this: http://rosiesays.com/2011/07/05/jennifer-egan-makes-me-do-crazy-things/. But don’t do like one commenter said and print it off to tuck in the book before she reads it. Work it out first.
Epigraph - connects Ch 12 with Alison imagining, coming home, as it would be in the future.
Dystopia
NYC has a high sea wall that blocks people seeing the sunset; January temp is 87*; people can’t take strollers into public places because they inhibit evacuation; the Twin Towers site is called “The Footprint” though no one remembers what the towers looked like There are no lawns in Arizona and the desert is covered with solar panels and wind turbines. The earth has shifted on its axis due to global warming, resulting in shorter winter days and longer summer ones.
The Goon Squad
is Time.
Here's Alison's slide showing Lincoln's songs with pauses:
Egan, Jennifer. A visit from the Goon Squad . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.
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Labels: book review, culture, dystopia, new media
// posted by Janiasea @ 1:01 PM 
Comments:
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thats some wonderful data being presented, and combining song length with a subject haunting factor is pure wonder, how thoroughly entertaining the entire piece, im thinking the books i read dont have enough characters and this has affected my emotional growth in some wild way now thanks
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