Alec Molloy

Energy, balance, outbreak: Listening to Bach I saw you years from now (More years than I’ll be allowed) Your toddler wobbles gone, A sure and grown woman.

It sat, squatting on a whole third of a page in the New Yorker—a poem by the late Seamus Heaney. It took me to the fourth line to start welling up in tears. All the careless joys of childhood, and finality of existence in just a few words. It struck me even further when I considered it in light of my review yesterday of Teju Cole’s recent short story—how it’s short dispatches couldn’t form a narrative that was as deeply engaging as one told through traditional media. Inspired by a conversation I had with my friend Erica about my post and (of course) Marshall McLuhan, I decided to revisit the topic.

Poetry is one of the oldest forms of literature, with origins in oral cultures long before literacy. Some of the earliest long narratives were epic poems, such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and Odyssey. Preliterate cultures used them to tell stories and pass values and traditions through generations. Even after the introduction of alphabet systems in 8000 BC, poetry was still used by the masses, unable to comprehend the complexities of Cuneiform’s pictographs. It wasn’t until well after the development of the Greek alphabet in the 9th century BC that prose was able to take hold as a popular medium of storytelling. Writers were soon free of rhyme and meter, (which had been necessary to aid storyteller’s memory) and exciting new literary forms took shape.

Despite claims from Socrates that the new technology would kill the “oral state of mind” he valued so much, the technology took hold. In his seminal text, Understanding Media, McLuhan writes, “The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy.”

Technologists would have you believe we stand on the edge of an electronic revolution. With perfect networks of information, humanity will finally enter utopia. Media theorists would have you believe we are becoming information hunter-gatherers in this “perfect” network. So in this perfect network, where all information is available instantly, how are compelling narratives told?

I feel much like Socrates. I fear for the loss of the “literate state of mind.” The loss of focused attention and deep thinking provoked by prolonged engagement. But as I mourn the death of long-form print, I still find myself engrossed in daily periodicals, television shows, movie sequels. Much like a book that is too long to be read in one sitting, these media texts require, and often encourage interruption. Sometimes it is time spent away, the suspense that is the greatest part of a media text. What would television be without season-ending cliffhangers? Who could sit straight through five hours of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, or eleven hours of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.The waiting stimulates reflection. Analysis. Arguments over how Sherlock escaped death in the series two finale of the eponymous BBC series.

There still remains a point where the narrative cannot become any more granular in order to be comprehended, but Heaney’s poem made me realise there can be beauty in the more concise. I imagined futuristic poetic narratives told on microblogs. Sporadically published perhaps, but written with great care, and focusing on communicating a feeling or experience rather than a temporally-structured story. Intense affect delivered in just a handful of bytes. This vision gave me hope for the future of media and “new types of awareness,” as McLuhan puts it.

Early on January 8th, writer Teju Cole began publishing snippets of prose. They told the haunting story of a man walking into an alcoholic’s heart attack on a quiet city sidewalk. The story was told in the first-person narrative, but uniquely it was conveyed through a series of tweets. Or rather, retweets.

One story: written by an author in New York, sent to thirty-three confederates, tweeted, and retweeted. Consolidated in reverse chronological order on @tejucole’s stream. Broken up by tweets about CES, Google buses, and the New York Times redesign on my newsfeed.

I came in approximately three hours into the telling of the story, on a tip from a mysterious tweet. I scanned through the tweets. Read them again more carefully. I followed Cole. I went back to work. Fifteen minutes later I returned to Twitter. Remembered I had been reading the story. Returned to Cole’s stream to read his new updates. I did this a few more times over the course of an hour until the story came to an abrupt end.

This is the current state of online reading—sporadic and unfocused. But is this the future of narrative writing?

Narratives as told through the window of the status box are hardly new. Independent writers, digital zines, and online literary magazines have been experimenting with the form for years. Perhaps the most famous piece is Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box,” which was published over the course of nine days on The New Yorker’s Twitter account in the summer of 2012. Egan’s piece seemed uniquely well fit to the medium, as the syntax of the story took the form of short “mental dispatches.”

Black Box was a novel and cute tribute to serialised science fiction. A reimagining of a bygone era for today’s popular media. Cole’s piece is however, as The Verge’s Russell Brandom described it, “conventional prose.” But released in stuttering fragments. Not exactly fit for the medium, except for the unique twist of it being told through thirty-three individuals.

Cole’s short story is popular today (putting his writing ability aside) because it exists in a space devoid of competition. But what happens when the other Teju Coles of the world start spinning their yarns on Twitter? It was hard enough to follow one narrative over the course of four distracted hours. At scale, this storytelling world of tomorrow doesn’t sound so appetizing as it does sound overwhelming.

For a narrative to succeed it must provoke intense emotional or intellectual responses. This is best achieved through concentrated engagement—something hypertext is inherently ineffective at. The only emotion hypertext has been consistently able to provoke through its history is anxiety, and not through the efforts of any author.

“No, Google is good at knowing what technology wants”

I was sitting at a dinner table in the city a few weeks ago discussing Google, when my friend Edward made that statement.

For the last few months I’d been fascinated with Google’s latest efforts in natural-language interfaces; enough that I was almost ready to jump ship to Android to try them out. Apple’s high design has always held sway over me, but I felt they had been lagging behind on the information services front. Siri and iCloud left a lot to be desired—especially for users with most of their digital identity locked away on Google’s servers. I had my eye on an HTC One for a while, but hadn’t pulled the trigger yet for reasons that Edward’s comment finally made me realise.

My anxiety started with a Nexus 7. I bought it in February to test the waters before switching phones, and develop on. As a slave to Apple products for the last few years, I had been spoiled by a very human approach to devices. And though the Nexus 7 matched up to Apple’s counterpart on paper, the experience was in no way comparable. I played around with it for a while, but now it only gets attention when I need to do device testing.

I was disappointed, but I wasn’t sure why. All of Google’s pitches for it had made sense. The lower cost and tighter integration with their services made it seem like a no brainer. But that didn’t matter; I couldn’t stand using it.

A few months later… Glass

Ever since their first teaser video two years ago I had been obsessed with the idea of Glass, Google’s first foray into wearable computing. So when they announced the application to beta test I immediately applied, and a month later I received a message from Google informing me I had been accepted.

After committing to purchasing I was practically frothing at the mouth, waiting for my fitting day. All my free time was spent prototyping applications, and I brought the device up in conversation constantly (thanks to all my friends for putting up with me all those months).

Stepping into the world of Glass at the Mountain View campus (and later the New York “base camp” for a replacement) was like walking into a cult meeting. A cult where everyone wore Glass, and was super excited that you were super excited to join them. Not quite Apple store on launch day excited, but enough to make me uncomfortable. I spent about an hour getting fitted and being given a full demo by a very nice Glass “Guide” before venturing off into the wild.

My initial impressions of the device were positive. Voice commands worked surprisingly well, video quality was impressive, and the attention I got from passersby on the street was an added ego bonus.

I wore it as much as I could for the first week or so—only taking it off in restrooms, while sleeping and showering, and in meetings. I wore it to my college graduation, where I broadcasted live POV video of the ceremony to my family sitting back in the crowd. I used it to capture bike rides, my roommate’s antics, and silly moments like this. Friends were excited to try the device on for themselves, and I was excited to share in their excitement.

Though as the weeks passed, the novelty of being a novelty started to wear off. The attention I got became invasive, so I used it less in public. Anytime I wore Glass among friends, conversation would inevitably drift towards on the device and I found myself wanting to hide it. And the device’s new role as a status symbol for overprivileged white Valley males didn’t help.

As I became more critical, I realised Glass wasn’t as useful as I had been imagining. Voice recognition was incredibly good, but it still slipped up enough to make typing on my iPhone a relief. Having to carry around a battery back if I wanted a day’s charge wasn’t great either. But worst was the feeling of being limited by the interface. Information on the web isn’t structured to be conveyed in the highly concise manner Google requires for developers; complex questions require a lot of additional browsing that can be done much faster on a smartphone.

Even when I did wear Glass, I didn’t use it. The social awkwardness of talking to Glass in public had become unbearable. There were a few days when I wore it for a couple hours before realising it hadn’t even been turned on. Eventually, I spent days without giving Glass a thought before guilting myself into wearing it to justify the price tag.

I put Glass down on my bureau sometime in early September. And I haven’t worn it since.

Before I go any further, a quick history lesson: Google is known for pushing half-baked concepts out the door, and then quietly shuttering them. Take Google Wave: its noble purpose was to replace email with a more structured and digestible form of communication. But the chat/twitter/email mashup’s purpose was just so damn hard to explain.

Its real-time collaborative editing capabilities were technologically impressive, but it struggled to become anything more than a public curiosity. People were in awe of its magical powers, but didn’t know how it was supposed to make their life better.

Sound familiar?

Ripples. Not Waves.

Google didn’t know what users were going to do with Glass. Hence the whole “Glass Explorers” beta program. What they hopefully realise by now is that Glass doesn’t work as a consumer device. And privacy issues have little to do with it.

Glass is just super socially awkward.

A society that still makes fun of wearing bluetooth headsets isn’t going to be welcoming to an even more intrusive device. Google’s first attempt at “getting technology out of the way” has had the unfortunate side effect of inserting technology into every social interaction.

I often chose my phone over Glass not because of the shoddy technology, but rather out of a desire for discretion. Tearing into a string of voice commands in a Safeway aisle might seem futuristic the first few times, but self-consciousness started to get the better of me. This isn’t something that Google can patch in one of their monthly updates. There is a serious societal shift that needs to take place before Glass becomes a commercially viable consumer product.

It took years for the cell phone to achieve market saturation, and only then did it become acceptable to use the device as pervasively as we do today. Before saturation it was a novelty and a status symbol.

Google is good at knowing what technology wants. Their edge has always come from technological prowess, after which design and market success follow.

This “technology first” attitude is the reason for all their half-baked, misunderstood failures. The twist here is while their products might fail, the underlying technologies do not. Just as Wave transformed into Google Docs, so too will Glass transform into much more palatable (and perhaps successful) products.

While I seriously doubt a head-mounted wearable will find success as a consumer device anytime soon, Glass will likely live on in its current form as an enterprise product. But parts of Glass will start showing up in other Google products. And some already have.

Glass represents only part of a larger strategy by Google. Its failure will be trivial in their larger quest for natural-language search and frictionless access to services. Success comes from failing early and often. And nobody is better at doing that than Google.

I look back on my time using Glass with mixed feelings. Playing around on the bleeding edge was really cool, and I’ll never regret having had the opportunity to do so. But I’m done with it. Glass exists as a contradiction. It empowered me through access to information and a new sharing paradigm, but at the cost of contaminating proximate social interactions.

I don’t have the problems Google wanted to fix with Glass. I’m not the guy staring at my phone, recording video at concerts. I don’t impulsively check social media at the dinner table. In fact I hate people who do those things. And most importantly, I don’t believe becoming part-cyborg is going to solve all those issues.

Last month I wrote a hypertext document, Intimate Objects. It was written as part of my application to Sandbox, which is a community for young social entrepreneurs.

For the final round of the application process I had to create a wow statement which, according to them "can be completed in any format that you wish." As someone whose identity is strongly tied to digital representations, I thought the hypertext medium would be appropriate way to introduce myself.

The entry page includes a short explanation of the document, and links out to a few other pages. My intention is for users to have a Choose Your Own Adventure-style adventure through my life. While it breaks some of the golden rules of interactivity, links are purposely obscured to encourage users to search out pages themselves. My intention is for users to follow through to pages that they find of interest, rather that try to visit every page. My intent was to emulate the experience of meeting someone in person—instead of giving a boilerplate "this is who I am," there is a dialogue. And the user gets to decide the topic of conversation.

Building a “personal brand” is all the rage right now at my univerisity.

To help students get a job straight out of college, we are being told to have a positive social media presence, a strong résumé, professional behaviour in class, and even a personal logo. However, I there is one big part of the branding process that has been overlooked, probably because it so basic: naming.

My name is Alec, which is short for Alexander. Professionally I have always gone by my full name, “Alexander Vincent Molloy”, because I liked how it sounded. But in the last month I have started to change my name on all my social media accounts, usernames, résumés and email addresses. I even petitioned IT change my official name at work, which was surprisingly difficult to do (as Alec is not my legal name).

This process was prompted after receiving one too many emails from coworkers addressed to “Alex”. But in the last month I have come to realise that this name change has done a lot more for me than reduce the constant corrections that I’ve had to grown used to—it has changed the way people find me on the web.

I currently take up the 1st, 6th, and 10th Google results for “Alexander Molloy”. I share the results with Alex Molloy, a female marketer from the Bay Area, and Alexander Molloy a “Service Desk Analyst” from the UK:

But search for “Alec Molloy” and I get the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th results. There is just one other Alec Molloy, and he lives in Singapore.

Consider the statistics. According to The Internet, 185,000 Americans go by “Alex”, as opposed to the 10,000 Alecs out there. Even better, there are only 8,500 people with my last name.

While going socially as Alec and professionally as Alexander may have been alright in the analogue world, it might have made it harder for people to find me online. It may sound more professional to use my full name, but by dumping “Alexander” completely I am going to have a better chance at being the "Alec Molloy" of the Internet than I would have at splitting traffic between my two names.

Choosing a less-popular nickname to go by might be great for people who have one, but for others who don’t have a shortened name there always is the option of going by a different or hyphenated last name, or by adding in a middle initial. (It’s a trick that normal folk have done for years after their name has been stolen by a celebrity. I grew up in a town with a Randy T. Johnson, no relation to the baseball pitcher.)

My friend Stella Tran had a bit of a crisis last year when she discovered that stellatran.com was already occupied by an older and slightly more successful hipster. She has done an excellent job of differentiating herself by adding in her middle initial, and she can now be reached at stellaktran.com. It might not be as short and sweet as she likes it, but it works.

.

Best tracks of 2012:

Frank Ocean // Pyramids

Usher // Climax

Cassie // King of Hearts

Man Without Country // Closet Addicts Anonymous

Antony & The Johnsons // Cut the World

The xx // Chained

  Top 9 Albums of 2012. Click through for favorite selections from the album:

The xx // Coexist

Burial // Kindred

Purity Ring // Shrines 

Grimes // Visions

Man Without Country // Foe

How to Dress Well // Total Loss

Four Tet // Pink

Jessie Ware // Devotion

John Talabot // ƒIN

    Other albums I listened to this year: 

Animal Collective // Centipede Hz

Antony & The Johnsons // Cut the World

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti // Mature Themes

Bear in Heaven // I Love You, It's Cool

Beach House // Bloom

Bat For Lashes // The Haunted Man

Boom Bip & Charlie White // Music For Sleeping Children

Burial // Truant / Rough Sleeper

Chairlift // Something

Crystal Castles // Crystal Castles (III)

DROPXLIFE // FURTHUR

Frank Ocean // channel ORANGE

Holly Herndon // Movement

iamamiwhoami // Kin

John Maus // A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material

Sigur Rós // Valtari

Sleigh Bells // Reign of Terror

Editing Text with the Typewriter Tool