Several years ago the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began researching that most elusive of aesthetic experiences: the “chill” that you feel in your spine listening to moving passages of music. Panksepp’s studies make a convincing case that the shiver of pleasure we experience while listening to our favorite music is the release of endogenous opioids, the same molecules implicated in social bonding, parental love, the “runner’s high” — and, of course, in narcotic drugs like heroin and morphine. Panksepp has found that animals appear to have chill responses to music as well. In one widely cited study, he played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. (The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record “The Final Cut.”)
Now imagine taking Panksepp’s experiment one step further: instead of a chicken’s brain listening to Pink Floyd, imagine peering into a brilliant composer’s brain as he or she dreams up a new composition. Thus far, most brain-imaging research has focused on normal brains and on brains that suffer from some kind of disability. But we also have the opportunity to scan brains that are unusual in the sense of being unusually gifted. What vista into the world of inspiration will this open up to us?
I don’t know firsthand what moments of true musical inspiration feel like. For me, inspiration revolves around words and sentences, and not melody and harmony. I’m not imagining myself to be a literary Stravinsky, but stringing text into narratives and arguments has been the most fluid of my mental faculties for as long as I can remember. Could brain science have something useful to say about this talent? I wanted to know what was happening in my head when a new insight arrived, usually half formed and barely grasped: a vague connection between two ideas, a new way of introducing a troublesome chapter, a phrasing for a sentence. For reasons probably both genetic and cultural, I am not much of a mystic, but these flashes of insight were the closest thing I had to the experience of mysticism. These sparks were the transcendence that Keats sought when he commanded us to “open wide the mind’s cage’d doors.” An idea shoots in front of my mind’s eye seemingly out of nowhere. Where did it come from?
How extraordinary that we can even begin to answer this question! We can only speculate where new ideas come from in the sense of their evolutionary roots, and we don’t really understand how the firing of neurons creates the rich subtleties of ideation. But we can determine, with split-second precision, the parts of the brain that are active in the creation of a new idea. We can map mental processes as ephemeral as having a hunch. On a fundamental level, we can tell where the hunch comes from. All it takes is a brave, nonclaustrophobic subject and a $2 million magnet.
I thought I was precisely that brave, nonclaustrophobic subject until they strapped my head down to the mechanical gurney, and I began sliding into a two-foot-wide tube, with only a mirror the size of a playing card supplying me with a glimpse of the outside world.
There’s no better way to say it: I was having my head examined. Mechanically speaking, the exam was being conducted by a five-ton GE Twin-Speed fMRI scanner. My guide through the world of advanced brain scanning was Joy Hirsch, director of Columbia University’s Brain Imaging Group, who had graciously offered to help me in my pursuit: to see the brain, from the inside, as it comes up with a new idea.
A week or so before my appointment with the scanner, I suggested an experimental structure to Joy: we would begin with my reading a series of nonsense sentences, followed by my reading someone else’s prose, and then I would read a passage of my own work — a passage from this book, in fact. In reading my own passage, I hoped to spur one of those imaginative leaps: something about the words would make me think of a new line to add, or a new way of phrasing the idea, or some other unpredictable insight. If all went well, the machine would take a snapshot of that idea forming in my head. fMRI scans can capture subtle shifts of activity within a three-dimensional model of the brain by measuring levels of oxygenation in the blood of nerve cells. It is not a perfect view by any means — you have to have roughly 500,000 neurons active in an area for the scan to register them — but it is as close to pure vision of the mind’s inner life as current technology allows us.
When I arrive for my session, Joy and I sit down in her office. She explains that each stage of the experiment will involve three sections of forty seconds each: rest, activity, rest. The scanner will start up, and I’ll do my best to think of nothing for forty seconds. Then the stimuli will begin — the flashing checkerboard or the text — and I’ll process that for another forty seconds. And then I’ll think of nothing again. Each 120-second stage will be repeated twice.
As Joy lays out the sequence, I start to worry that I won’t have time to actually think while in the machine; I don’t want to spend the whole forty seconds reading, particularly once we get to my own words. I want to have the words trigger some new idea or association in my head. So Joy agrees to make a last-minute addition: a final stage during which I’m shown a single sentence from my book and given the entire forty seconds to ruminate.
Then Joy walks me through the risks. “We’re looking at your brain here. So there’s a very small chance that we might see something in these scans, some abnormality.”
I nod. “You mean a brain tumor.”
“Sometimes when we do work with experimental subjects — people who come in to help with our research, and who don’t have any symptoms — they say, ‘If you see something in there, don’t tell me.’”
“Hey, if you see something in there that you don’t like,” I smile ruefully, “by all means let me know.”
Then she moves on to the dangers associated with the scanner itself. “It is a fundamentally safe procedure, noninvasive.” I think of a news story from a few years back in which hospital staff had left a metal trash can in the room with an fMRI. When they began scanning a patient, the magnetic field triggered by the scanner being switched on turned the trash can into a lethal projectile that killed the guy instantaneously.
I choose not to bring this up.
A minute or two later, we walk over to the fMRI room. The machine itself looks like an oversized clothes drier — about ten feet high with a huge GE logo embossed above the hollow tube at its center. I lie down on the mechanical gurney, and the technician gently tapes my forehead to the cradle at the end, hands me a pair of earplugs.
And then I’m in.
Being inside an fMRI machine is definitely more unpleasant than it looks to be from the outside. The space itself is astonishingly small, and the sense of being encased in a huge piece of machinery unsettles more than you think it will. For my experiment Joy and her team have placed a small mirror above my eyes that enables me to see a sliver of the world outside the tube. This sliver lets me read the text that they’ve projected onto a screen, but it also prompts a surge of nausea as I first enter the scanner.
The fMRI machine is capable of capturing two types of images: conventional MRIs that are higher resolution but don’t show specific activity in the brain, and then lower-resolution “functional” images that show the brain actually thinking. (Functional MRI images work because active areas of the brain require an increase in oxygenated blood, which creates a small but detectable disturbance in a magnetic field.) We begin with a round of conventional images of my brain, during which time the machine rattles ominously around my head. Then we move on to our little experiment, starting with the checkerboard pattern.
You can easily tell when the fMRI is in its “functional” mode because it emits an uncomfortably loud, high-pitched, pulsing tone. (Hence the earplugs.) When you’re actually inside the scanner, it sounds like a truck backing up into your head. For the first forty seconds of “rest,” I find myself incapable of thinking about anything other than the excruciating noise. When the flashing checkerboard appears on the screen, it occurs to me that this is like attending some kind of demonic performance-art happening — a tiny, cramped space with strobing black-and-white images projected onto a screen, all accompanied by monotonous, piercing rhythmic tones.
But by the second iteration of the checkerboard stage, I start getting accustomed to the noise and the physical enclosure. I can see Joy smiling at me through the mirror, and the sound becomes more background noise than anything else. In fact, I feel comfortable enough that I start having difficulty shutting off my brain during the “rest” periods. First, I find myself thinking about ways that I could describe the setting, shaping the story of my fMRI experience while my head is still stuck inside the device. When I catch myself doing this, I smile in my dark tunnel. It occurs to me that this is one of those small examples of the brain’s miraculous resilience and flexibility: you stuff your brain into a physical situation that should by all rights overwhelm it, and you tell it explicitly not to think of anything, and yet still it churns away in spite of everything. You couldn’t imagine a more hostile environment for free associating, but here my brain was riffing away, as though I were daydreaming in the shade of an oak tree.
Then I’m reading. It ends up being easier to focus on my own words, but there certainly isn’t time to ruminate. As we finish that stage, I think to myself that I’m glad we added the rumination “bonus round.”
I’m glad, but I’m also getting tired. I haven’t moved my head more than a centimeter in around twenty-five minutes, and the space is starting to close in on me. When the first frozen slide of text arrives on the screen for the rumination stage, I feel like I’ve been caught off guard. “Shit!” I say to myself. “Now I have to think of something.” For forty seconds of this $2 million machine’s time, I think of absolutely nothing worthwhile. I think about trying to think about something. If there is a cognitive version of flailing, this is what I do for the first scan.
But when the second round — the last run of the entire experiment — arrives, I’m prepared. I decide to let my brain do what had come naturally to it throughout the experiment. I’ve already started down the road of describing the experience in the scanner — why not take this last round and actually start working out the language? And so when the text flashes up on the screen, notifying me that the forty-second rumination period has begun, a sentence starts to take form in my head. I am writing.
The words I string together in the fMRI are roughly the same words you encountered a few paragraphs ago describing the resilience of the brain in the most uncomfortable of situations. The general idea arrived a few minutes earlier, but the exact phrasing originates in that last session. The specific sentence, of course, is incidental; what makes it interesting is that Joy Hirsch and her fMRI are watching as it forms in my head, as my brain pulls the words out of the nothingness and makes them into something fixed — sturdy enough to remain intact until I sit down at my computer several days later to type them.
A few days pass, and Joy sends an e-mail to let me know that the results are in. “You’re going to like this,” she writes temptingly. The next afternoon I take the A train up to 168th Street, and Joy and I sit down at a conference table to spend some quality time with my brain.
Joy has assembled a collection of about forty color printouts, each displaying four images of my brain at work. The images are overhead views, and each one is a “slice” of my brain, starting with the brain stem, at the very bottom, and ending with the tip of the cortex. For each stage of the experiment — there are four in total — the fMRI has captured twenty-five slices of my brain going about its business. That business takes the form of changes in blood flow to different regions; the scanner first looks at my brain during the “rest” periods, then during the “activity” period, and it records any salient differences between the two. These images let you see the areas that are relevant to a particular task, and shut out the background processing that the brain is always doing. My brain stem, for instance, was steadily plugging away maintaining my breathing pattern — along with many other mission-critical operations — but that area doesn’t light up on the scan images because those patterns didn’t change during the experiment.
Areas that do show noticeable changes appear on the images as a cluster of bright yellow pixels, fading out to orange and red at their peripheries. The images look strikingly like the Doppler radar images you see on the Weather Channel. (If you blur your eyes a little, you might think that yellow patch on the image was a thunderhead, not a brainstorm.) The image is projected over a grid with numbers running along each axis. The numbered grid and the slices create a three-dimensional system of coordinates, the latitude and longitude of neuromapping. The grid is made up of small cubes called “voxels,” and each voxel has a specific address.
Joy begins by laying down the twenty-five slices for stage one of our experiment, the dreaded checkerboard. The pattern of activity is immediately visible, even to my untutored eyes, mostly because there’s literally nothing going on in 95 percent of my brain. Only a thin band wrapping around the back of my head, roughly at ear level, glows yellow.
“We know that the flashing checkerboard is a very salient stimulus for just the visual processing areas of the brain,” she says. “And that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
She points to the yellow band: “This part of the brain is all primary visual cortex. What’s unique about this is that this activity doesn’t get out of the occipital lobe — and nothing goes on in the frontal lobes. Nothing. This is just as exclusively visual as you can get.” We both start to laugh. “Your brain is doing the minimal amount it has to do to sit there and look at that stupid checkerboard!”
Looking at those blank areas on my mental map reminds me of all the times that someone had gravely explained to me that we only use 10 percent of our brains, and then waxed rhapsodic about how smart we’d be if we could tap 100 percent. Of course we only use a small percentage of our brain at any given time — and it’s a good thing, too! Your brain has dozens of dedicated tools, most of which aren’t relevant to whatever it is you’re focusing on right now. If your visual cortex keeps kicking into overdrive as you’re trying to memorize a speech, the words won’t stay in your head as readily. Only using 10 percent of your brain is a sign of efficiency, not underachievement. Arguing that we’d be better off with 100 percent is like raving about how great Shakespeare would have been if he’d managed to use all twenty-six letters in each of his words, instead of a small fraction of the alphabet.
There’s something in Joy Hirsch spreading out the images on the table that brings to mind a tarot card reader, but there’s nothing mystical in her analysis. I find myself thinking, This person I barely know has ventured inside my head in a way that no one has ever ventured before. That’s why the hall-of-mirrors interpretation feels wrong to me. It’s not an endless simulation I’ve entered into here, but rather something that feels authentic, even intimate.
Thus far all the images we’ve examined have been composite sketches: each stage included two runs, and so the images are a combined look at activity over the two of them. But with the rumination round, I had asked Joy to look at the two runs separately, because I had fared so poorly the first time around and because in the final run of the day, I had managed to get my brain exactly where I’d wanted it to be for my forty seconds in the spotlight.
The images from those two sessions do not disappoint. In the first run, small spots of activity are scattered across my brain, mostly in red voxels (suggesting less activity than the yellow). There’s little shape or symmetry to the map; my brain looks cluttered. But in the second run, what jumps out at me immediately is how silent most of my brain appears. Only the language centers light up with any intensity, along with a sharp yellow rod at the center of my brain, extending up to the very top of my cranium. There’s very little visual activity, and almost nothing from the eye-movement regions.
“There’s a concept of efficiency that has emerged in the neuroimaging community in the last few years,” Joy says. “It’s basically that when there’s a task that the brain is having difficulty doing, the pattern looks very distributed, like this here.” She points to the cluttered image of run number 1. “This was not an efficient action — as opposed to here, where the specific tools of the brain are contributing in an efficient way to the task at hand.”
“You really look like you got your act together here.” She’s pointing to that bright yellow dot on the upper images of run number 2. “Here’s more evidence of that — look at this very focused medial frontal gyrus. This is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of this scan — this is a very high-level executive function of the brain, and you can see it running like a pole all the way down to the cingulate. I think that the medial frontal gyrus is important in coordinating different activities in the brain, reaching for the right tool at the right time. In this last scan, the entire structure — not just a part of it — is active.” In Joy’s phrasing, my language areas were perfectly “robust” during these inspired forty seconds, but they didn’t turn out to be the most interesting element of the image. It was the overall orchestration, the clarity of the pattern, that stood out, the lack of mental clutter.
What had I been hoping to find? I thought about this on the subway ride home. In the crudest sense, I suppose I thought that my skill at stitching words together in my head might turn out to have its own modulelike presence in the scan: a distinct patch of neurons devoted to imagining sentences. If the brain is filled with all these modular tools, then somehow it seems logical that tasks you’re good at should have some visible presence on the brain map. Sometimes this is the case: Einstein’s brain had unusually large inferior parietal lobes, which we think gave him his extraordinary spatio-logical skills. (He famously solved problems as images in his head weeks before he could turn them into working equations.) Such a skill most likely would have shown up directly on an fMRI: a person gifted in spatial intelligence shows more activity in regions of the brain dedicated to spatial processing.
But in my case, the scan revealed something quite different. (I’m no Einstein, as it turns out.) There was no special module. What caught Joy’s eye in the final rumination scan was not a specific region, but the overall pattern of brain activity. The tools in the toolbox weren’t particularly impressive, but the toolbox itself was well organized. In fact, the only specific region that seemed to be at all above average was the one responsible for coordinating activity in other regions. Perhaps the most telling thing about my brain map was what didn’t show up on the images: when I was focused, there was almost no activity in areas that weren’t related directly to the task at hand. Compare that to my episode of cognitive flailing in the first run of the rumination stage: on that scan, there’s hardly a discernible pattern. It’s mostly noise, and little signal.
I have no idea how replicable my fMRI results would be if I tried the exact experiment again, and it’s unclear whether that pattern of organization — with its strong medial frontal gyrus and its many silent regions — holds true for my brain generally, or just for this little snapshot. But I suspect there is a larger truth nestled in that last fMRI image, one that has begun to change the way I think about people I know. I suspect that the world of talent is made up of two kinds of brains: some that have specific modules that are unusually good at their job, and some that are unusually good at keeping all the different modules organized. Both types of brains come across to us as talented, as intelligent, but I think the types are different enough that you can learn to recognize them if you know what to look for. We all know people who have dazzling skills: they can sit down at a piano and pick out a tune they heard last week; they can calculate interest rate payments in their head; they can actually understand quantum mechanics. But we also know people whose brains seem gifted in a different way: no stunning, off-the-chart skills, but a general competence and efficiency, with very little noise complicating their signal.
My dad used to say to me during my high school years: “You’re not a rocket scientist, but you’re smart and you’ve got a lot of talent.” I used to bristle at the remark. (If I wanted to, maybe I could be a rocket scientist!) But now I think he was onto something. I’ve met rocket scientists — and astrophysicists, and programming wizards, and architectural geniuses — and I don’t possess anything like what they’ve got mentally. I don’t have their special gifts. But those fMRI images made me think that perhaps I have something else, a little less dazzling, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Maybe I have a well-orchestrated brain — with no world-famous soloists but a nice sound nonetheless. In a sense, this is what my dad had been trying to say, in slightly different language: I was talented in an orderly brain kind of way, not a supermodule kind of way.
It was only one experiment, but the machine had given me something that machines don’t normally deal out: a hunch about myself, and maybe a larger hunch about people in general. I’d been dreaming for more than a year of capturing my brain as it came up with an idea, and thanks to Joy and her uncanny device, I’d managed to catch precisely that glimpse. The results were mesmerizing and remarkably legible, even to my untrained eyes. But they didn’t provide unequivocal answers or magic bullets. They were more like clues. Seeing my brain come up with an idea had given me another, more interesting idea, one that still reverberates in my head as I write. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a scan of that?
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Copyright © 2004 Steven Johnson, reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster.
Nearly eight years after Justin Hall uploaded his first hypertext diary entry, weblogging has finally hit the mainstream. Everyone seems to have a published opinion on this not-so-new new thing, and if the attention seems a little belated, it’s not undeserved.
After all, a number of significant developments separate us from pioneering sites like Links From the Underground or Robot Wisdom: The blogging population itself has grown dramatically, and has begun organizing itself into a genuine community rather than a series of isolated sites; software tools have been built specifically to let noncoders create and maintain blogs; and the universe of potential pages to link to has expanded by several orders of magnitude since Hall launched his site. There’s simply more Web to log, and consequently more need for experienced guides.
Then there are the high-profile migrations: print journalists like Mickey Kaus, Virginia Postrel and Andrew Sullivan, who have managed to enhance the mainsteam credibility of the blog genre, while simultaneously exploring new business models. (With some genuine success — Sullivan says he is now breaking even, and his new book-club feature has made him an Oprah-style kingmaker on Amazon.com.) Just as it did five years ago with the Web zine world, the appearance of old-journalism celebs has triggered a wave of articles and Op-Eds, debating the merits of this new form. Thus far the debate has centered on whether blogs constitute a new model of journalism or simply a minor variation on an existing theme: an Op-Ed page with more links and fewer fact checkers.
But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they’re not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan’s wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won’t be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.
The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It’s about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed “vanity sites,” the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they’re not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They’re challengers to the throne of Google.
As it happens, the bloggers already function as a kind of kitchen cabinet for Google’s relevancy ranking algorithm. Google measures relevancy by determining how many other pages link to a given page — the more people point to your “Remington Steele” tribute site, the more likely it is that Google will recommend it to someone searching for info on ’80s detective shows or Pierce Brosnan or Henry Mancini theme songs. Those pointers are themselves ranked by Google: If a lot of highly linked-to pages link to your page, you’ll rise even higher in the rankings.
You’d be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google’s results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other’s sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas” — a hit with the blogging community — and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)
This is the Blogger Effect. It’s what happens when the arbiters of relevance in the “attention economy” shift toward a bottom-up structure. Google thinks pages are relevant now not just because they’ve received the imprimatur of Condé Nast or the New York Times, but because they caught the interest of Sopsy and friends.
Now, that’s good news if you like Sopsy more than you like, say, Howell Raines. But if you can’t stand Sopsy, or you’ve no idea who he/she/it is, then it’s a little bit disturbing that the site is skewing your Google rankings. There are significant political consequences to the Blogger Effect: Because the blogging community contains a disproportionate number of libertarians, it’s possible that Google searches on certain hot-button issues will start skewing toward libertarian-friendly pages. Given Google’s increasing prominence, this libertarian slant could prove to be more significant than the more familiar concerns about liberal bias in the major networks, and conservative bias on Fox News. No sensible person thinks “The O’Reilly Factor” is free of political slant (save O’Reilly himself). But the great oracle of Google is supposed to be above such partisan concerns.
The solution is not to eliminate the bloggers from Google. The solution is to create more Googles. Or, even better, to transform the data generated by the bloggers into something that rivals what Google does — to extract some new kind of collective wisdom out of a universe of armchair opinion leaders.
Think about those bloggers pointing to Sopsy and causing the site to rise in the Google rankings: Are they providing a journalistic function with those links? On some level, perhaps. But they are also doing something closer to information management, more librarian or archivist than Woodward and Bernstein. The bloggers are helping Google learn what pages should be connected to other pages, or to particular text strings. They are helping Google transform the Web from a disorganized mess into a more coherent universe of useful data. But their contributions to this noble cause have been limited to date, partially because the bloggers themselves have been too busy boxing with the phantoms of traditional journalism.
Beyond the unspoken collective effect on Google’s results, the blog world has already been mined for global patterns in a number of interesting experiments, like Blogdex, which creates a kind of alternative headline news by tracking popular URLs in recent posts. Then there’s Weblog Bookwatch, which scans for Amazon URLs in new blog entries, and constructs a regularly updated list of books that are “top of mind” with bloggers. (An interesting corrective to ordinary bestseller lists, in that it measures which books get talked about, rather than which ones get bought.)
But both Blogdex and Bookwatch share a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time.
Time is central to the philosophical DNA the blogs share with journalism: Both compulsively feature today’s link, today’s controversy, today’s top books. This might seem like an obvious organizational principle, but it comes with great restrictions. Google, for instance, is largely oblivious to time: When you use Google, you’re usually not looking for up-to-the-minute info, you’re looking for authority and depth. (Try getting a useful stock quote directly from Google and you’ll understand immediately.) Many of the bloggers that I follow comment on links that are time-sensitive on the scale of a year or two: Someone’s rant on the latest XML spec revisions is just as relevant next week, though probably not nearly so relevant a decade from now. But because those links fall off the front door every few days, they effectively enter a de facto oblivion, where I have to hunt them down actively three weeks later when I’m looking around for useful assessments of XML. The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it’s being featured on a rotating shelf.
If there’s a time element that I do care about, it’s not the just-off-the-wires time of today’s news. It’s my time. It’s what I’m doing right now. I don’t always want to know what über-blogger Jason Kottke happens to be thinking about this morning — I want to know what he thinks about the page I’m currently reading, or the paragraph I just wrote. If I stumble across a page 10 weeks after Jason wrote up a description of it on Kottke.org, his description is just as valuable to me as it was 10 weeks before — in fact, it’s probably more valuable, because I’ve come across the page on my own personal journey. But as it stands now, to figure out if Jason’s referenced the page I have to copy the URL and paste it into the search engine on Kottke.org. If I’ve got 20 or 30 bloggers that I’m following, I’ve got to paste that URL into 20 separate input fields.
But the bloggers needn’t be anchored to the headline-news mentality. Think of them as less like a newspaper substitute and more a kind of guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you surf. (The Alexa software created by Brewster Kahle relied on a similar approach: He called it a “surf engine.”) Punch up a URL and if Jason, or Andrew Sullivan, or Sopsy has an opinion about that page, you see their comments in a floating window alongside your main browser window. It’s a simple enough trick: Sites like Blogdex are already tracking blog-borne references to different URLs. All your browser would have to do is send an additional request to a database of blogged URLs anytime you pulled up a page: If there’s a match — if one of the bloggers you’re following has referenced the URL — their comments get sent back to your machine and appear in the floating palette.
The critical standardized part in this machine is the URL: Because pages — and Amazon products — have distinct identifying text strings, you can assemble references to them into new higher-level forms of information: bookblogs and blogdexes and guardian blogs. But the URL is only one potential component part among many. If we had standardized tags for just five or six additional elements, you could start mining the blog space for on-the-fly information resources that would truly rival Google’s. You’d need fixed categories describing who is doing the linking and who his or her “friends” are; you’d need a summary of the response to the link, alongside the full text of the response; you’d need keywords, as well as the number of comments generated in an active thread responding to the link.
Perhaps most important, you’d also need a way to distinguish between positive and negative links. Right now, systems like Google’s page rank presume that the decision to link to a page is by definition an endorsement of the page linked to. You need only think of how many times Andrew Sullivan has linked to the Op-Ed columns of his arch-nemesis Paul Krugman to recognize the flaw in this logic. Positive linking should certainly be the default, but if Bloggers are going to be organizing the Web for us, they need to be able to point to pages that suck without giving those pages an even higher standing on Google.
If the blog space were to standardize around these categories, what kind of information-management tools might we be able to create? Here’s one scenario. You define a few “guardian” Bloggers, perhaps by checking a box when you visit their site. You also instruct your software to watch the activity on sites maintained by “friends” of those key bloggers. You tell the software that you want a medium level of intrusiveness: In other words, you want the system to point out useful information to you, but you don’t want it constantly bombarding you with data at every turn. And then you start using your computer as you normally do: surfing, writing e-mail, drafting Word documents.
Behind the scenes as you write or read, the software on your machine scans the last few paragraphs for high-information text, the six or seven words that make that paragraph distinct from the average paragraph sitting on your machine. If there’s a URL included in the text, it grabs that too. The software then sends a query to the blogs maintained by your guardian Bloggers, as well as those maintained by their friends — say 20 blogs in all — and searches for posts that include those keywords. Since you’ve defined a medium level of intrusiveness, it might only grab the URL and summary text for posts that match half of your keywords, and that appear on 25 percent of the bloggers you’re tracking. Let’s say Jason Kottke has linked to a related article; if four other bloggers you’re following have also linked to that URL, Jason’s description of the article pops up beside the paragraph you’ve just written.
This wouldn’t be a recommendation engine so much as a connection machine, tracking the flow of words across your screen and linking them fluidly to other text residing on the Web. You can make those connections as loud or as soft as you want: Perhaps the software only suggests other URLs and blog posts when you request them. (Running your blog analyzer might be akin to running a spell checker when you’re done with a draft.) Other users might set their thresholds around timeliness or “heat” — only pop up a window when there’s a related link that’s been posted in the past 24 hours, or when there’s a link that’s generated a 20-post discussion thread.
There are almost as many potential ways to manage that new flow of information as there are bloggers providing it. But to open up these new avenues, the bloggers are going to have to shed their dependence on the traditional journalistic models: Instead of going to today’s blog the way you pick up today’s paper, the bloggers should follow us around, providing context and commentary, supplementing our libraries and our memory. Many blogs out there possess the standards and intelligence of conventional journalism, but there are already too many of them to keep track of the way we subscribe to old-style magazines or habitually tune in to favorite TV networks. If the blogging population expands at the current rate, soon enough you’ll be able to spend an entire day just reading the front doors of all your bookmarked blogs. Better to do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you.
In an essay published in last month’s Business 2.0, James Wolcott describes the Blog experience as “a one-on-one unmediated relationship between writer and reader paradoxically made possible by the most mass of media, the Internet. Each blog is like a blinking neuron in the circuitry of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain.” It’s a typically well-crafted phrase, and there’s something undeniably compelling about the description, but the fact that Wolcott tosses out both ideas — one-on-one relationships and superbrains — as though they were synonymous suggests that it’s the poetry of the words that attracts him, rather than the underlying substance. There is a world of difference between the one-on-one encounter and the emerging superbrain. Blogs already excel at the former — they’re long on one-on-one encounters. But their emerging superbrains could use a little work.
If you’ve read any of the reviews of “Gosford Park,” you know already that the praises being sung for Robert Altman’s latest film have generally resolved into a single chorus: Beyond the brilliant ensemble performances and the uncharacteristically restrained camerawork, the real achievement of the film is the revival of that most tired and unfashionable of narrative genres — the English manor-house whodunit. And at first glance, it does seem like a remarkable feat, particularly given Altman’s track record at reviving defunct pulp entertainment. (A certain spinach-eating cartoon sailor springs to mind.)
The manor-house whodunit — after a brief flowering in the late 19th century and a long middle age of mediocrity sustained largely by Agatha Christie and her disciples — now survives mostly in the degraded form of Lifetime channel reruns of “Murder, She Wrote.” Breathing new life into this form is like resuscitating Professor Plum after he’s already been stabbed in the drawing room.
And yet somehow Altman pulls it off. But not just by collaborating on a deft and genuinely touching script, or assembling a cast of Britain’s finest not-quite-marquee actors (along with the sublime American actor Bob Balaban, who co-conceived the film). Altman doesn’t just revive an untimely genre by propping it up with smart writing and smart actors: He performs a more impressive sleight of hand, which is to take a tired genre and reconnect it to its roots — like a kind of stop-motion film of literary history run in reverse. You can think of it as an Agatha Christie movie that slowly transforms itself into a 19th-century triple-decker novel as you watch it. Which is intriguing enough, but it’s even more so if you keep in mind that the Christie genre descends from that more highbrow literary tradition, although the lineage is often obscured. It’s like taking a wayward bastard son and reuniting him with his noble, if somewhat calcified, true father. Which, as it turns out, is one way of describing the plot of “Gosford Park.”
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Successful genres have a way of transforming the physical spaces they occupy, turning them into backdrops for a predictable set of actions. (Think what the “Godfather” films and their ilk did for Little Italy.) Walk through the ornate living spaces of a British country estate, and the mind naturally conjures up images of Hercule Poirot grilling the squire over a glass of claret.
One of the many things to be said in favor of “Gosford Park” is that Altman openly embraces these archetypes, and refrains from the more obvious tactic of archly deconstructing them: We have an honest-to-god stabbing in the library, and an honest-to-god lineup of the assembled suspects in the drawing room, each of whom is interrogated by a pipe-smoking inspector. You don’t get the sense that Altman is orchestrating these arrangements in order to laugh at them, as easy as that laughter might be. (He does toss off a few obligatory jokes courtesy of Balaban, who plays a Hollywood exec scouting the location for a “Charlie Chan Goes to London” flick.) “Gosford Park” is a funny movie, to be sure, but it takes itself seriously.
Taking the clichés seriously turns out to be the first step to understanding their origins. We’ve seen so many manor-house whodunits that the mind naturally starts looking for arsenic bottles and sinister butlers when confronted with a British country home; but when you think about it, the connection is a strangely arbitrary one. How did murder become so intimately tied to the iconography of British upper-class country living? The answer is a kind of detective story in itself, and to tell it you have to go back several generations, to the first great blossoming of the manor house narrative, in Jane Austen’s novels of the early 19th century. The estates in Austen’s books are invariably as vividly rendered as the characters themselves — Pemberley, Mansfield Park, Hartfield — and they are far more than mere backdrops. Austen’s plots orbit around their manor houses the way a heist movie orbits around a bank vault. The plots begin because something is unsettled in the stable system of the manor house — Sir Bertram’s departure from Mansfield Park; unmarried Emma living with her father in Hartfield — and they can’t resolve themselves until the estate has been literally settled, until Darcy and Elizabeth retire to Pemberley.
The emphasis on the manor homes can make Austen’s novels seem suffocating and excessively delicate to us now, but there is a historical reason for the primacy of the great estates in Austen’s work: The world of agrarian capitalism revolved around the large landowners and the “culture of improvement” they espoused, a value system that helped justify their newly enclosed and privatized land by making it more efficient. (There are few more sympathetic figures in the Austen canon than the gentleman farmer, industrious and versed in the latest agricultural techniques.) As Raymond Williams observed in his masterpiece, “The Country and the City,” while it is certainly true that Austen’s novels represented only a small fraction of the “real, material” conditions of British life in the early 1800s, she was nonetheless measuring the most profound geopolitical tremor at that moment in British history. And the great estates lay at its epicenter.
As it happened, the physical layout of the manor house proved singularly hospitable to elaborate plots, with its mix of public and private encounters, its shooting parties and rotating guests, its upstairs/downstairs mix of social classes. Stories naturally flourished there, and so the setting persisted through the 19th century, even as it became less and less relevant to Britain’s increasingly industrial and urban social reality. The manor house continued on as an important setting in the Brontës, in Thackeray, in Trollope and George Eliot. (Less so in Dickens, the most metropolitan of the 19th century British novelists.) By Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and “Felix Holt,” it is showing its age: All the interesting things in the society are happening elsewhere. And even a novel like “Middlemarch” that studiously avoids the great beasts of London and Manchester has to leave the estate grounds to connect to the larger world. (When Dorothea marries Casaubon and retires to his home, the narrative almost lurches to a halt — Casaubon has to die for things to start up again.)
And so the cast of characters widens beyond the short list of those invited up to the manor, and the manor consequently loses its centrality. You can think of Austen’s novels as estate narratives that occasionally pay a visit to the town. The defining unit of “Middlemarch,” on the other hand, is the town; the estates live on, but at the margins now.
But the manor house, ultimately, was hard to give up. It was too lucrative for the storyteller, and there was too much fetish value associated with it. And so as the novel moved inward, toward the more psychological realm of early modernism, its locales moved inward too: back to the estates of Henry James, and then later, Forster and Waugh. The organic connection to the land, and to the mass political movements of the time, are abandoned for the crisp clarity of the Jamesian conversation, with its intricate choreography of moves and countermoves, its subtle insights and betrayals. Eliminate the broader system to which the country house connects, and you get a narrative of pure mental abstraction, a clash of characters and not classes.
From there, it was not far to get to the whodunit. Do away with the Jamesian psychological intricacies, and the endless syntactical contortions, and borrow the inspector figure originally developed by Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle and voilá — you have your Agatha Christie drawing-room mystery. “The true fate of the country-house novel was its evolution into the middle-class detective story,” Williams writes. “It was in its very quality of abstraction, and yet of superficially impressive survival, that the country house could be made the place of isolated assembly of a group of people whose immediate and transient relations were decipherable by an abstract mode of detection rather than by the full and connected analysis of any more general understanding.” Like many of its real-world specimens, the literary country-house detached itself from history and politics, from its original organic connection to the land, and became an ornate backdrop for murder most foul — like a kind of narrative exoskeleton, abandoned by its original hosts, and now inhabited by a lesser organism.
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In “Gosford Park” Altman faithfully re-creates the manor-house whodunit shell, while simultaneously reuniting it with its original host. On a formal level, “Gosford Park” turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of the 19th-century novel, and in particular by a narrative device that was essential to the novel’s social reach, its efforts to achieve what Williams called a “more general understanding” of its extraordinary historical moment. That device is the inheritance plot, which is as omnipresent in the 19th-century British novel as the adultery plot was in the French.
The inheritance plot was a kind of conceptual glue that helped the novelist connect an increasingly fragmented society, creating an interlinked web of convicts, dashing young urbanites, ancient nobility, factory owners and tenant farmers. It underwent a dazzling array of permutations, but its general shape was a reliable one: By the end of the novel, a long-suppressed familial line is unearthed, linking two different social groups, and usually restoring some sort of misplaced inheritance to its rightful owner. The device could be hackneyed, to be sure, but it enabled the novel to expand beyond the increasingly isolated worlds of specific social classes. At its best — in “Middlemarch,” or “Felix Holt,” or “Bleak House” — it became a powerful tool for social commentary, usually exposing the moral corruption of the social elite, a way of novelizing Marx’s line about the nightmare of dead generations weighing on the brains of the living.
The inheritance plot offered an escape route from the claustrophobia of the manor-house narrative; it translated the social betrayals and violence of the age into the familial realm that the novel had traditionally restricted itself to, without sacrificing the broader scope that was required to do justice to 19th-century life. If you wanted to write about both factory workers and the landed gentry, you couldn’t simply invite them all to a shooting party; you needed another device to connect those increasingly disconnected worlds. You needed the secret histories of the inheritance plot.
And herein lies the genius of “Gosford Park.” The film manages to embed an inheritance plot straight from the pages of “Felix Holt” or “Our Mutual Friend” inside the shell of an Agatha Christie whodunit. Without giving too much of the plot away, the movie’s climax unearths a dark story of ruthless class exploitation, disguised paternity and the injustices of factory life — without ever leaving the grounds of Gosford Park itself, save the first five minutes of the film. The 19th-century novel needed to abandon the great estates to capture the larger dynamics of British society, thereby leaving a profitable opening for the middle-class detective story to exploit. “Gosford Park” is a kind of return of the repressed: the manor house whodunit reunited with its long-lost ancestor, the inheritance plot. It makes for a beautiful symmetry: The past returns to haunt the characters of “Gosford Park,” just as the inheritance plot structure returns to enliven a long-moribund genre.
About 10 years ago, Altman staged his Hollywood revival with “The Player” — a postmodern sendup of Hollywood’s hollow men, where every plot twist segues into a movie pitch. Since that film’s release, deconstructed genre films have become a tired genre in themselves (reaching a low point with this year’s “Not Another Teen Movie”). “Gosford Park” suggests an exit strategy from this postmodern hall-of-mirrors: You revive a dead genre, not to showcase its essential hollowness, but rather to connect it to its original, and more vital, roots. It’s a kind of literary reconstruction, and a hopeful one at that. Just when you expect a mock Miss Marple to totter into the dining room, you find George Eliot instead.
