Strangling technology

Plus a captive sunflower and a shape-shifting bird

PICTURE & WORDS

THE EVENING LIGHT on my neighbor’s sunflowers, now grown to eight-feet tall, has repeatedly drawn my eye in recent days. Walking past, I wedged my wide-angled lens inside the wire fence to get a “clean” shot, like the radiant sunflower postcards we’ve all seen. But when I edited the shoot, the ones outside the wires, even slightly out of focus, were the ones that I found evocative. Increasingly, I’m working to train myself to look for the imperfect details that complicate the subject and and subtly shifts its meanings.

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WHAT’S BUGGING BARBARA?

Inscrutable Technology

By Barbara Ramsey

I AM WELL-EDUCATED, have a post-graduate degree, and made it into my seventies without falling off a cliff, shooting myself in the foot, or electrocuting myself. That is to say, I am not as dumb as the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. But I am no longer able to operate many of the electronic appliances in my house.

I can still drive a car. I manage a sewing machine well enough to create beautiful quilts. And after seriously studying the owner’s manuals, I can use both the stove and the toaster at my house. That’s about it.

I love our local radio station and would listen to it every time I drive somewhere, but my automobile’s media system is utterly confounding. Is it offended by ancient radio technology? Is that why is it so difficult to turn on? My husband’s in charge of the television—which is apparently not a television but a computer screen that displays TV shows—because I don’t understand how to make it work. I depend on my iPhone for a myriad of tasks, but please god don’t force me to upgrade. I’m as novelty-loving as the next person, but I don’t love novelty for novelty’s sake. Shouldn’t “new” mean “new and improved”?

 “New and worse” sucks, but “new and essentially unchanged” is actually worse. New and essentially unchanged translates as unnecessarily confusing. Apparently we must maintain the illusion of progress even when there is none. The new-new-new holds a stranglehold on our minds and wallets.

When I was eight years old, I could go into any house in my hometown and use any appliance. The light switches all worked the same. The toasters all had identical levers. There were a few differences between gas and electric stoves but their temperature dials could all be readily deciphered. Things seemed purposely designed to be operated by anyone with a third grade education and that was fine. Why have these principles of simplicity and clarity have been abandoned?

More than fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler warned us of “information overload” and I understand why that seemed like a potential danger. But the future is now here and I’m more endangered by inscrutable garage door openers than I am by too much information.

I am not looking for a return to flip phones! I’m hoping for a simple design revolution where the on/off button is separate from the volume control. I want fewer menu choices and a more obvious way to use my own appliances. And I want to be able to figure out the buttons on the damn microwave.

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BIRDS

Great Blue Heron, Deer Lagoon, Freeland, Washington

Great Blue Heron

THEY ARE SHAPE-SHIFTERS, apparently gawky and then astonishingly graceful. They ball up in the cold and slowly uncoil before a sudden strike. They are silent in the stream but can cackle like crows upon takeoff. They fish alone but sometimes work a low tide in groups of six or more, each with its own patch. They are found in creeks, lakes, and on the edge of the sea, hidden in the marsh and perched in trees. Some let me sit nearby while they troll a stream. With their braided necks and splays of long breast feathers that flutter in the wind, they are more complexly constructed and extravagantly decorated than a Victorian lady’s hat, and more sublime.

My first successful portrait was that of a Great Blue Heron and I’ve photographed dozens since, including a large roost with a bald eagle protector whose fee was a few of the herons’ young. I never tire of seeing them hunt with long, agile necks and long, sharp beaks. At sunrise, they are the early bird catching the fish, their bodies and movements silhouetted in fiery light. More than any other bird, they remind me of birds’ dinosaur heritage. While watching their long wings glide with precision just above the water, you can imagine yourself flying in time, only rarely touching the surface.

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Snippets

FROM AN EDIFYING article by social scientist Rachel Kleinfeld in Persuasion on the daunting challenges of building a pluralistic democracy and how current DEI programs fall short. “To put it plainly,” she writes, “no large country has ever successfully transitioned to a majority minority demographic while maintaining a full democracy. Experience suggests that such a transition is much more likely to be blocked than to succeed.” That makes it all the more urgent to pursue policies and programs proven to work. Here’s an example of the changes she says are needed in universities:

One form of rigor that is particularly essential to doing diversity differently is an end to trigger warnings and the fear of identity harm they entail. Diversity courses should help students get curious about one another and about themselves—not shut down questioning as too sensitive or hurtful. Toni Morrison said that speech is violence. It is not. Words can lead to violence—and as a scholar of political violence, I know that a very particular type of dehumanizing speech does precisely that. But conversations that explore ideas—even ideas that make some people uncomfortable—are fundamentally different, if they are pursued in a setting of respect for individuals and curiosity.

Moreover, decades of study into how to overcome anxiety shows that exposure actually reduces fear—while avoiding triggering content and even reading trigger warnings can increase anxiety, and might be particularly bad for the precise population they are intended to support: survivors of trauma, among whom studies have shown trigger warnings can worsen PTSD.