Don't I wish this trend existed a few years ago
This article I saw today made me sigh wistfully. (Or at least smirk and shake my head. :-))
"Love me, love my blog," as Netorati couple-surf
"LONDON (Reuters) - A man and a woman sit side-by-side in a New York cafe, drinking beer, sharing food, and not saying a word. Instead of chatting, they are typing on a laptop about the tunes played through a shared iPod.
"Realising that communicating via typing was far more comfortable ... we conducted ... our date without speaking. We traded headphones back and forth and typed and ordered beer and wine and more food ... The waitress thought we were crazy," wrote singer Amanda Palmer at http://www.dresdendolls.com/diary."
I wish this kind of activity would have been acceptable in my dating days. I wish I could have had some quality couple-surfing time on my dates instead of sitting through a bunch of forgettable movies. Actually, maybe not "couple-surfing" -- that sounds too idle and unengaging, almost like watching television. I would prefer a more challenging kind of couple-geekery, like working on open-source applications together. :-) Or, hell, designing websites. Which is, in my opinion, a perfect date activity. Intellectually engaging, but not so challenging that it could not be done socially. And perfectly suited for people like me, whose brains were hardwired with a preference for text medium. Well, maybe not hardwired, maybe just optimized that way by a loop of self-reinforcing habits.
Conversely, speech is soooo not my medium. Unfortunately, it is the preferred medium of communication for most people, and is considered irreplaceable on a date. Spoken word as a primary means of communication is so deeply entrenched in everyone's consciousness that I never even tried to suggest the kind of activity mentioned in the article -- silent couple-geekery to any of my dates. :-) (It didn't help that back in those days -- up until 4 years ago -- WiFi had not yet become prevalent at Austin coffeeshops, and lack of internet access would mean lack of tools for getting anything done -- all the technical information I need I look up on the internet.)
Now I can claim I was simply ahead of my time! :-)
I didn't think anyone would seriously consider this idea. But why not? Talking is not the only form of communication. Writing code together can be just as much of communication. What's more, the strictures of the medium -- the fact that you have to write your ideas in a programming language -- ensures that your ideas are a lot more rigorous and content-laden than most of the stuff people spout when they are "just chatting" about nothing.
Of course, I realize that a programming language can express only a very small subset of thoughts that cross a human mind. So this rant is mostly in jest. :-) But still I sometimes wonder about the unexpected joys of communicating in a much more restrictive medium than human speech. I even started writing a science fiction story about it, only to find it going nowhere, because it didn't have interesting characters. Characters are my bane. Ideas are the easy part. I can come up with science-fictional ideas by a bucketfull. Writing characters is where I hit the wall.
(A possibility of existence of mediums that are much more expressive than speech interests me too. And in fact, a couple of years back I wrote a story where such a medium existed, but I did not explore it very deeply in the story. It was more of a sidetrack. The story was about something else. Not long ago I found a story by Greg Egan, TAP where he explores essentially the same idea I mentioned in my story, only in a much more interesting way. Sigh. But that's Greg Egan, of course, so I'm not really jealous -- I feel flattered to even come up with the same idea that crossed the mind of one of the SF Greats of all times. :-))
"Love me, love my blog," as Netorati couple-surf
"LONDON (Reuters) - A man and a woman sit side-by-side in a New York cafe, drinking beer, sharing food, and not saying a word. Instead of chatting, they are typing on a laptop about the tunes played through a shared iPod.
"Realising that communicating via typing was far more comfortable ... we conducted ... our date without speaking. We traded headphones back and forth and typed and ordered beer and wine and more food ... The waitress thought we were crazy," wrote singer Amanda Palmer at http://www.dresdendolls.com/diary."
I wish this kind of activity would have been acceptable in my dating days. I wish I could have had some quality couple-surfing time on my dates instead of sitting through a bunch of forgettable movies. Actually, maybe not "couple-surfing" -- that sounds too idle and unengaging, almost like watching television. I would prefer a more challenging kind of couple-geekery, like working on open-source applications together. :-) Or, hell, designing websites. Which is, in my opinion, a perfect date activity. Intellectually engaging, but not so challenging that it could not be done socially. And perfectly suited for people like me, whose brains were hardwired with a preference for text medium. Well, maybe not hardwired, maybe just optimized that way by a loop of self-reinforcing habits.
Conversely, speech is soooo not my medium. Unfortunately, it is the preferred medium of communication for most people, and is considered irreplaceable on a date. Spoken word as a primary means of communication is so deeply entrenched in everyone's consciousness that I never even tried to suggest the kind of activity mentioned in the article -- silent couple-geekery to any of my dates. :-) (It didn't help that back in those days -- up until 4 years ago -- WiFi had not yet become prevalent at Austin coffeeshops, and lack of internet access would mean lack of tools for getting anything done -- all the technical information I need I look up on the internet.)
Now I can claim I was simply ahead of my time! :-)
I didn't think anyone would seriously consider this idea. But why not? Talking is not the only form of communication. Writing code together can be just as much of communication. What's more, the strictures of the medium -- the fact that you have to write your ideas in a programming language -- ensures that your ideas are a lot more rigorous and content-laden than most of the stuff people spout when they are "just chatting" about nothing.
Of course, I realize that a programming language can express only a very small subset of thoughts that cross a human mind. So this rant is mostly in jest. :-) But still I sometimes wonder about the unexpected joys of communicating in a much more restrictive medium than human speech. I even started writing a science fiction story about it, only to find it going nowhere, because it didn't have interesting characters. Characters are my bane. Ideas are the easy part. I can come up with science-fictional ideas by a bucketfull. Writing characters is where I hit the wall.
(A possibility of existence of mediums that are much more expressive than speech interests me too. And in fact, a couple of years back I wrote a story where such a medium existed, but I did not explore it very deeply in the story. It was more of a sidetrack. The story was about something else. Not long ago I found a story by Greg Egan, TAP where he explores essentially the same idea I mentioned in my story, only in a much more interesting way. Sigh. But that's Greg Egan, of course, so I'm not really jealous -- I feel flattered to even come up with the same idea that crossed the mind of one of the SF Greats of all times. :-))