Dim Prospects

How not to get a job: study English. Image Source: Forbes.

Forbes just did a piece on the 'Best and Worst Master's Degrees for Jobs.' The top 10 degrees for getting a job fell in the computer sciences, physics, mathematics, the medical professions, business and economics. And the absolute worst Master's degrees for getting a job, according to descending pay and projected prospects, are:

1. Library and Information Sciences
2. English
3. Music
4. Education
5. Biology
6. Chemistry
7. Counselling
8. History
9. Architecture
10. Human Resources Management

Yes, at the turn of a Millennium, we see history and architecture, down at the bottom. And at the very time when the technological revolution has caused global literacy and written communication to explode at a scale never before seen in human history, all the major disciplines which teach written expression and analysis are relegated to the bottom of the employment and pay scales? And in a global economy, the study of foreign languages, rhetoric and grammar also have no prospects? Really? Did politicians, economists, jobs analysts, bankers and financiers learn nothing in 2008? Why are they still allowed to control the balance of power in our societies?

Forbes did not mention other subjects in the traditional humanities - law, philosophy, classics, linguistics, fine arts, theatre, dance, theology or the applied arts - presumably because these fields did not even offer numbers high enough to enter their sample statistics. Nor did Forbes touch on social sciences beyond economics, except for psychology, which is listed via the underrated discipline of counselling.

No wonder there is a terrible recession on, when this unimaginative, blinkered, conventional view still predominates. This view places supreme value on activities which generate a communications revolution and the basic infrastructure of international trade. Forbes hands us a world of middlemen and technicians who apply knowledge rather than discovering it: administrators, marketers, managers, industrial designers, economists, engineers, medical personnel and computer scientists. Empiricism is king. Positivism and neo-positivism consume all mysteries.

If there are any twinges of uncertainty, there are mass marketing machines and media cultures which create the false impression that the human aspects of the Millennial tech revolution have indeed been addressed. But they haven't. In a recent interview, indie author Craig Stone attacked the cult of celebrity, a myth of paramount creativity drummed up by marketing and industrial business concerns, which are no longer the popular commercial model:

I think with social media and Kindle we finally have the fairest way to find the world’s best writers chosen from a pool of millions – rather than what we have had traditionally – the best writers presented to us by the publishing industry who choose for us from a limited pool.

Is Stephen King the best horror writer in the world? No – but he is the best horror writer from a small pool printed by the publishing industry who resist other writers to maintain the reputation of writers that are household names.

In this new dawn, those previously thought of as writing gods are going to be revealed as just writers. Good writers, perhaps, but not the best because for the one Stephen King published there are hundreds ignored to sustain his reputation as the best because it’s easier and more profitable to publish a terrible Stephen King book than a great new book by an unknown writer.

Ironically, wildly popular Millennial reality talent shows seek to combine the two creative realities Craig Stone identifies. But these efforts are slickly produced and do not really solve the problem. Faux creativity is draped gaudily over every new gadget and applied software suite. Social networks build the Big Lie of the Individual, made 'special' by 'friends,' 'connections' and personal preferences. At some point in the 1980s and onwards, the word 'club' was used constantly in marketing lingo to confer special membership and privilege, when in fact it denoted that one had been absorbed into another featureless herd.

Pulp Horror Nights

Web of Evil #17 (1954). Image is in the public domain. Image Source: The Digital Comic Museum.

When most people think of America after the Second World War, they think of 1950s' prosperity and the baby boom. But the post-war period also saw societies and cultures around the world - including those of the victors - digesting the horrors of war.

Two popular American genres which embodied that process were film noir and pulp fiction. Pulps had earlier roots running back through the century. The Shadow is one of the most famous of pulp heroes from the Depression, whose popularity endured into the 1950s and up to the present day, due to a fantastic radio show (listen to one episode here). By the 1940s and 1950s, pulps had evolved into comic books.

If you have ever been curious to see these rare pulp-style comics from the early Cold War era before horror themes were censored, you can see some of them for free online. Since 2010, the Digital Comic Museum has made Golden Age comics in the public domain available for downloading, here.

Remembering Jack Horkheimer

Image Source: Robert Duyos / Sun-Sentinel.

Today, Jack Horkheimer would have turned 74. Happy Birthday to a dear and sadly departed man. From the mid-1970s to mid-2000s, he captured something of the best of that era, a hopeful, optimistic fascination with science, merged with the infinite possibilities of imagination (see, here, here, here and here). By contrast now, information is everywhere, but there is much less wonder.

NASA's New Mars Rover En Route to the Red Planet

Artist's impression of Curiosity, the new Mars rover, due to land on Mars on 5 August 2012. Image Source: NASA via Wiki.

Today at noon EDT, NASA is hosting a teleconference on its new Mars rover, Curiosity (also known as the Mars Science Laboratory). Curiosity is bound for the Red Planet and is due to arrive there this August. You can follow the teleconference here.

Netspeak Tales

LOLcats were the first Internet trope to make Netspeak universally popular, starting in 2005-2006. Image Source: I Can Has Cheezburger via Macmillan Dictionary.

The personal pronoun is dying. On Twitter, texting and instant messaging, in newspapers and other written media, technology prompts writers to drop the personal pronoun so that sentences begin with verbs, and the pronoun is assumed. Where possible, even the verbs are chopped, as: Meet u l8r. So much on 2day.

Sometimes, language crumbles in the other direction. Around 2004, I read a great transgressive short story about disintegrating Millennial language. In the story, an increasingly alienated protagonist gradually loses his ability to speak to other people. He begins dropping words from his sentences; the linguistic break down signifies his helpless and unstoppable withdrawal. In the end, he can only say the word "I" repeatedly. The affliction is called aphasia. It is not the loss of actual physical ability to speak out loud, rather a psychological loss of will to utter words, a frightening mental block between one's inner life and the outer world.

The author and title of this story escape me; the publication might have been the New Yorker, The Observer or the TLS; maybe one of the blog's readers will recognize the plot. Incidentally, the story about aphasia was published alongside Chuck Palahniuk's story, "Guts," which is another fictional example of trauma of the protagonist breaking through social reality of the reader. You can read it here.

A few years ago, a friend of mine was in a terrible car accident, and in the aftermath became mute for a time. It was a descent into silence, an invisible wall with which no one could argue. I realized that while language is held by intellectuals to be the hallmark of civilization, the willful erasure of language is ironically a moment of power, a last defense against total collapse.

And yet, George Orwell pegged his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the brutal rise of Newspeak, a gutted, simplified language that signified the soullessness of the society. Some blame top-down policies of schools before they condemn the grassroots spread of technology. This complaint kicks a hornet's nest about educational agendas popularized over the past fifty years, which no longer permit spelling and grammar to be taught. So which is it? Is language collapsing and heralding a brutish, dystopian future - or are we on the verge of a linguistic renaissance?