Famously, Socrates said that written language would erode memory. Thankfully, Plato wrote this down or else I wouldn’t have read it. Socrates also said that writing or prepared speeches would produce weaker understanding than a back-and-forth dialog.

Ideas that really matter are those that a lot of people hear about. Before mass media, the best way to do this was to package an idea in entertainment, like a ballad, or disseminate it through a network of people, like a church. Writing didn’t really become the dominant mode of expressing ideas until the printing press and the Enlightenment (probably related, those two events).

Ever since then, your best bet on changing the world was to write. Obviously there are counterexamples – my impression is that Hitler’s speeches in the Bürgerbräukeller produced more power than Mein Kampf – but I think that’s the general trend. Radio and then television were supposed to kill the written star, but I think they just carved off niches.

My perspective, as a university student followed by a white-collar worker, is that writing is still the #1 medium of power. I’ve put more effort into my writing than any other form of communication.

But I get the sense, from YouTube to Obama to TED Talks to deliberative democracy to the slam poetry reading I went to last week, that our society is taking an oral turn. I’m a little skeptical that it’s happening exactly now, maybe it’s just now that I’m noticing it, or that it’s happening now in the circles that I frequent? Anyway, that’s my impression and it concerns me.

I’ve just started reading Bowling Alone for class, so this isn’t a full review but rather some initial thoughts.

Bowling Alone popularized the concept of social capital, one of the four main factors of production:

natural capital

land

physical capital

stuff

human capital

knowledge

social capital

who you know and who knows you

You can’t measure social capital directly, so Bowling Alone is an attempt to measure it indirectly. It’s based on the thesis that society’s stock of social capital has been dropping in the last few decades. Putnam believes that community organization membership (civic engagement) is the strongest generator of social capital. The title refers to the statistic that the demand for bowling went up while membership in bowling leagues went down.

Notes and thoughts about social capital:

• Civic engagement peaks in middle age, does that mean middle-age people have the most social capital?
• Social capital is a private good with public externalities: people accumulate social capital for their private interest, but society benefits as a side-effect. Has the private value of social capital decreased? Should society subsidize civic activities?
• Social capital, like other forms of capital, has no moral value. Putnam gives examples of the KKK and terrorist cells as community organizations.

“Sexual orientation” implies a spatial relationship. However, the commonly-used terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are relative terms that require locating the subject in gender space. It makes more sense to use fixed terms that refer only to the object of desire: androsexual for masculinity and gynosexual for femininity.* “Bisexual” implies binary gender – people who don’t have gender preferences are pansexual (the big circle in the diagram). And people who aren’t attracted to anyone are asexual.

The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid breaks a person’s orientation into five gender-dimensions:

1. who are you attracted to?
2. who do you connect with emotionally?
3. who do you socialize with?
4. who have you had sex with?
5. who do you fantasize about?

I think the first three, sexual orientation, romantic orientation and social orientation are key identity characteristics. (Although one could go further and distinguish between romantic relationships, emotionally-intimate friendships and acquaintances, unless the confusion is intentional.) The same prefixes for sexual orientation apply. For example, this conveniently orients the term “asocial”.

* Note: Using “androphilic” and “gynophilic” mixes orientation and fetishes. It also legitimizes pedophilia: we’re intentionally using language to oppress pedophiles here.

BC’s police forces are known for taking a middle ground in drug enforcement: they rarely press possession charges but don’t support legalization or decriminalization. Still, I am shocked to hear Victoria’s new chief of police (transplanted from Vancouver) go on record that Victoria does not have a drug problem, drug abusers do not cause significant public disorder and hard drugs are relatively hard to acquire.

I’m expecting the Chief, the media and politicians to have a discussion about this over the next week or two. It could be true for all I know. For example, I only recently came to understand that crack and meth are the popular street drugs, not heroin as the media always told me growing up.

Unfortunately, alcohol addicts have a very high cost to society, so perhaps this is far from good news.

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have never been on Facebook is that it takes too much time. After joining, they quickly realize that their friends are not actually generating that much interesting activity (the days of death by 1000 SuperWall pokes are long over). Most of what your friends do is just broadcasting and interactions are generally small and quick. It’s not for nothing that anthropologists call these social interactions “grooming”.

The most common complaint about Facebook made by people who have suspended their accounts is that it doesn’t significantly contribute to their social life. These people fail to understand that the little actions of monitoring their friends’ broadcasts (done before social networking with gossip) and engaging in grooming add up to social cohesion. But what about all the broadcasts you don’t care about in the least and all the friends you never interact with? The problem, in my opinion, is that you aren’t friends with the right people on Facebook.

If you’re a promoter or political organizer or something like that, then your professional Facebook profile should collect as many friends as possible. If you’re a regular citizen, then I think the proper use of Facebook is to do high-quality grooming of a smaller number of people. I propose setting a fixed number of friends and unfriending someone every time you go over that number. This has to be a fuzzy process for a few reasons:

• not everyone you socially interact with is currently on Facebook (eg: your boss, your grandmother)
• after you lose touch with people you hang on to them for awhile online to reduce friction in restarting the relationship
• when you first meet someone you friend them as part of the process of building a social relationship, a process that might fail

I’m going to use Dunbar’s Number: 150. There are many reasons why this number is arbitrary, but there’s some precedent and it is a good symbol. I hit 151 friends today and unfriended someone I met only once many months ago. If you’re with me, join this group.