Pico Iyer and his Japanese wife Hiroko Takeuchi

THAT'S HIROKO LN THE LEFT.

Pico Iyer who is an amazing, soft-spoken travel writer who has written a number of travel books on subjects as diverse as the Dalai Lama and airports - he has been described as a transcendental travel writer - and he reminds some observes of Alain de Botton in Britain with his reflective take on the trivia of travel. Pico is married to the former Hiroko Takeuchi, who was formerly marrried to a Japaense salariman but in an unhappy way. The couple had two children, but they later divorced after Hiroko met Pico and fell in love with him. Now the Iyers live in Japan with Hiroko's two children.  She is a lovely woman who can wear with silk clothing with panache - she once wore a traditional Tibetan dress with wonderful intricate weaving and fabulous wraps that had people in the room admiring her. Pico and Hiroko have decided not to have children together, and there new blended family is perfect for both of them. 

How did they meet? Hiroko was at the time the wife of a

Japanese "sararyman" with young kids. ["Sararymen" are known for being
wedded to their job, working long hours at the office and then
spending additional time entertaining their customers in bars.]
Somehow Pico befriends her and they spend a large number of hours
together, in what seems to be a platonic relationship. [The information
is from Pico's book called "The Lady and the Monk".] Pico has written
that one never loses ones "gaijin" (foreigner) status in Japan and it's true. [n 20, years,
the inveteraete global man has not even bothered to learn Japanese, for crying out loud, by
his own candid admission! What's he doing there then? Is she his beard?]
Hiroko is economically better off - her husband is a good
provider (as most sararymen are). She is also older and is not looking
to escape her country. It is an emotional vacuum that she is trying to
fill. And she finds it with Pico.
They are walking along one day and Hiroko asks Pico
"You tell parent about 'girlfriend'?"
Pico is cagey and mutters that he doesn't have 'a girlfriend.' Is he saying he is gay? No way!
Hiroko won't have any of it.
"I am a man?" she asks, meaning "Am I not a woman and am I not your girlfriend?"
One Indian pundit says: "I have always been very surprised that the very erudite Pico finds Hiroko
attractive, with her pidgin English speech.''

[Bishop Tutu appears in Iyer's book on the the Dalai Lama; and Vaclav Havel makes an appearance; but both are overshadowed by the luminous presence of the author's wife and constant companion, Hiroko Tageuchi, the "uncrowned princess" of Dharamsala.]

THE CONSTANT DIN - "the CD"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c34UGXlYEwA



In a recent interview, the writer George Steiner spoke about "the constant din" that surrounds us 24/7 now in this postmodern
high-tech world we have created. He was speaking of the need to find silence from time to time, to get away from the constant din
of life. And then Time magazine essayist Pico Iyer wrote a splendid oped commentary in the New York Times the other day
titled "The Joy of Quiet."

Things come together. After reading the Steiner interview last week, I took the way he spoke of "the constant din" to have an extra
meaning, and I put some quotation marks around the phrase and shortened it to "the CD." And by CD I mean "constant din" and by "the CD" I mean
"the constant din."

I sent the new coinage over to the folks at Urban Dictionary, and 23 hours later, in the midst of the constant din, the editors there accepted it and
"the CD" is now part of the online dictionary. In addition, I sent the link over to Facebook, I blogged it and then I made a YouTube piece about
it as well. And then I sent the entire linkage event by email to both Mr Steiner and Mr Iyer.

A new meme is born.

Steiner was asked in a recent interview conducted by a young woman: "You have argued that new technologies are a threat to the “silence” and “intimacy” necessary for an encounter with great works."

Steiner, now 82, replied: ''People are living in a constant din. There is no more night in cities. Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? I find this very worrying."

Iyer, for his part, spoke about how how had read an interview with cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? Iyer asked himself, and then he asked Starck the same question:

"I never read any magazines or watch TV,” Starck told Iyer. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied to Iyer, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Iyer also thinks that silence is golden.

"In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them -- often in order to make more time," he opedded in the Times. "The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight."

Pico Iyer knows what the CD is all about and why it is bad for us. George Steiner has known this all his life.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr wrote in “The Shallows.”

Mr. Carr also knows what the CD is all about and how damaging it can be. So do important thinkers and writers such as William Powers, Edward Tenner
and Emily Bazelon.

"The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, although one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month,"
Pico Iyer tells us in the Times piece. "The urgency of slowing down -- to find the time and space to think -- is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context."

"Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”

Pascal also once said that "all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Ouch! Oi. He knew about the CD, too.

Iyer notes: "We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines."

The CD, the CD, the CD threatens to do us in! That damn constant din.

So what to do?

Iyer observes that two of his journalist pals observe an “Internet sabbath” every weekend, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, "so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation."

Iyer also says he friends who try to go on long walks on Sundays, or conveniently “forget” their cellphones at home.

For Iyer, who lives in Japan now with his Japanese wife and her two children, he has never once in his life used a cellphone and he's never Tweeted or entered Facebook.
He does use email, however, although for some reason he does not reply to my polite questions by email.

I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

Iyer says he's looking for a kind of postmodern joy that goes beyond the CD, which a monk named David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

Me, I'm looking for a way to put the CD its place and keep it on a tight leash. We do not need "a constant din." We need a constant peace. Iyer says it well, and Professor
Steiner knows it all too well. We are doomed, doomed, if we don't keep the CD at bay.

It will only get worse, no?

TABLETS CLOSE BOOK ON PAPER

Agree or disagree? "Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to
close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way
people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels."

“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all
publications become digital,” according to an observer overseas: "However, the jury is
still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to
wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us
whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of
brain chemistry, to reading off screens."

Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite
reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens,
according to a U.S. book industry study group.

"The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes
and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,”
said a study group spokeswoman, who added: "But yes,
if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper
superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."

Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly
wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how ''the reading brain'' is adapting to screen-reading, or
in the words of Cory Doctorow, ''screeniness'', according to a survey.


“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a
person's interest in reading overall,” said another analyst
in Britain. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain
adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"

"When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn
on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” he said,
adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the
mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in
terms of
brain chemistry."

He also believes it will be at least a century or more before print is
obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly
inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.

"Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need
to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended.
"It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us
about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"

Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper, but questions remain about 'the reading brain'

Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper,
but questions remain about 'the reading brain'

December 31, 2012
By Ben Lappaine, AFP


SAN FRANCISCO -- Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies President and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP, adding: "However, the jury is still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of brain chemistry, to reading off screens."

Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books.

In 2011, digital books earned about US$3 billion in revenue, an amount that the combined momentum of e-readers and tablets is expected to triple to US$9 billion by the year 2016, according to a Juniper Research report.

Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens, according to the U.S. Book Industry Study Group.

Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.

“The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole, who added: "But yes, if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how the reading brain is adapting to screen-reading, or in the words of Cory Doctorow, screeniness, according to the survey.

Owning e-readers tended to ramp up the amount of money people spent on titles in what BISG described as a promising sign for publishers.

Major U.S. book seller Barnes & Noble responded to the trend by launching an e-reader, the Nook, and other chains are picking up on the strategy, according to Juniper.

“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a person's interest in reading overall,” said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
“When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” Weiner said, adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in terms of
brain chemistry..
Bajarin believes it will be at least a century or more before print is obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.

“For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.

“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications, even if the reading brain finds screen-reading to be inferior to paper surface reading.”

Weiner expected hardback or paperback books to be preferred in some situations, such as home reading, even as digital dominates publishing.

“I think it is a myth that it is going to kill the print book business,” Weiner said.

“Will it force publishers to think differently?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, but it doesn't spell the demise of print (book) publishing.”

Newspapers and magazines, however, should read the digital writing on the wall, according to analysts.

“Newspapers and magazines have different issues,” Weiner said.

“Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended. "It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"

Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can't be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet.

In related news, Dr Ellen Marker, who studies reading and the reading brain in Boston, has her own ideas. The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.

Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.

Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.

“Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution,” Marker, 43, says. “We need both.”

With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.

Research and teaching take up most of Marker’s time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.

She discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”

“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”

One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills.

Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”

Who is the Angry Luddite?

Over Easy

Krantzstone (@Krantzstone) on : ''Brand yourself before somebody else does''

in response to my comment:re an internet guru [Rob Pegoraro] said ”Like it or not; people can be brands.” .......I had said: ........''NO NO NO,,,,people cannot be brands…this is a perversion of culture and civilization….people are people. PERIOD. we are not brands and this whole empowerment ME ME ME self-branding entitled BS is just that, BS!''

Krantz Stone or Stone Krantz, in Canada, replied in the comments section:

Dear Angry Luddite:

I don't think yours is a realistic attitude to hold in the age of the internet and of social media.

The term 'branding' may have corporate connotations which emphasize the commoditization of people's personas and reputations, but the fact remains that when our names and reputations are but a Google search away, no one can really afford to leave their personal reputations in hands of others: we have to take proactive steps to ensure that when employers (for example) Google our names, they don't come up with anything that would make them not want to hire us.

That's just one example of what personal branding means.

It's about controlling our image, our names, our reputations in the on-line, public sphere of the internet.

Even one comment on one blog post can speak volumes about a person: it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce whether someone is callous and thoughtless or kind and considerate by what one says on the internet, or how one says it.

If a post is full of spelling and grammatical errors and is incoherent, like it or not, people who read the post make pat judgements about the kind of person who wrote the post.

Likewise, what one says on Twitter (as Ashton Kutcher discovered to his dismay) can create a huge firestorm of controversy, even if the intent behind it might have been innocent at best and simply not phrased right, and so it's important that people make an effort to comport themselves on the internet as one might do if one were out in real life, speaking publicly, because that is in essence what they are doing every time they post something on Facebook, or tweet, or comment on a blog or website.

No matter how decent a person, or how well-spoken and urbane, if they don't make the effort to control what is associated with their (brand) name on the internet, they run the risk of having their online (and subsequently their real life) reputations tarnished as a result.

Whether that should matter much in journalism is a different story, although I would argue that journalism that is not read by anyone isn't really very useful, no matter how good the integrity of the journalist or how well-written their piece, and especially in the now precarious world of print journalism, journalists are basically being left to fend for themselves in terms of promoting their own work and thus, the need for personal branding.

A decent journalist might be able to garner sufficient Twitter followers, blog readers, Facebook fans, etc. solely through word of mouth of the quality of their work by reputation alone, but it's an uphill battle in a world increasingly stuffed full of self-styled news bloggers marketing themselves so that they might be heard.

There are only so many people whose Twitter feed people are going to want to read on a given day, it's not like there is an infinite amount of tweets that people have time or inclination to read, so they're going to start getting picky about who they follow.

A journalist who wants to earn a living and keep feeding their families needs to be able to generate the kind of following that social media can provide: at the very least, having that sort of following is exactly the kind of cachet needed for a journalist to be able to snag a job at a newspaper (where they care about whether a journalist has or will have the kind of following that will mean more people who might read (and buy) their newspaper and not some other, not to mention it mattering to the advertisers who largely financially support those papers).

At best, having that sort of constant and loyal following means that your journalism work isn't in vain, you're not just some schmuck with a blog writing to a nonexistent audience where you're only getting 10 hits on your page in a month, and 5 of those were you checking your own blog from your phone.

It means having the same kind of following that Pulitzer-prize winning print journalists had in the past, or Emmy award-winning news reporters, of being heard, of getting the kind of recognition for your hard work which is as important to career satisfaction as getting paid.

Otherwise, you might as well go do something else which is less stressful and might pay better. That's all personal branding really is, and I don't really see it as being this terrible or perverse thing that you seem to.

http://twitter.com/Krantzstone

re
http://robpegoraro.com/2011/06/27/journalists-brand-yourself-before-somebody-else-does/

We suggest a new term POT for personal operating tag or P.O.T instead of personal brand.
Any other suggestions? All ideas welcome pro and con.

AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report'' that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks

AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report''
that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are
bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks; before
this AP never reported the hidden truth!

MediaRecoder - New Yark Times
by Peter Jeremy and Nick Cardavid

The stars are paid for. We're talking about the paid promotional
gimmicks on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, where each
star's star costs $30,000 and is bought and paid for by the studios
as part of their marketing costs for upcoming films, concerts, books
and other events that tie in with the "awarding" of each "honorary" star.

Note: Roger Ebert has star there, paid for by some friends in Chicago,
according to a newspaper columnist in the Windy City. CBS TV guy Bill Geist also bought his own star, paid for itself himself.

For years, this crucial background information was kept from readers.
But in 2010, Barbara Munker of the German News Service dpa, reported
a story from Hollywood that laid out the facts: the stars are ordered up by
the studios to coincide with marketing campaigns and cost money, now $30K. the DPA article was on the DPA international wires, but not one USA newspaper printed it or even discussed it. Danny Bloom, lone blogger in Taiwan and a 1971 Tufts grad from Boston, saw the DPA story in the China Post expat
paper in Taipei and could not believe his eyes. All his life, he had
thought the stars on the Walk of Fame were real honors, and
set up by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to honor celebrities.
Turns out the stars have always been a paid PR promotional gimmick,
according to Munker, who has since been quiet on the subject. But her
2010 article is available online.

Bloom, a big fan of movies and Hollywood stars, yes, set out to ask the
AP and Reuters wire services if they could start reporting the truth
behind each star unveiling photo op ceremony, as the DPA had done.
So he wrote emails to editors at AP and Reuters and the New York Times Phil Corbett and got positive responses. Two years later, the AP told its
Hollywood reporters to start adding a last graf to every Walk of Fame
story that states the cost of the star and who paid for it.

So it's a win win situation for Hollywood, the stars, and the reading
public. And thanks to the AP, where editors read their mail and respond
to good ideas, the truth has now come out in print. thanks to danny Bloom's
patience, persistence and powers of persuasion, the truth has been set
free at the Walk of Fame. Reuters? New York Times? So far, AP is the
only news agency to toe the line and tell the truth. BRAVO!