The Code

Over by the lake there’s a neighborhood, a socially if not racially mixed neighborhood. Our lake is downstream from the city. It’s the third lake in a chain of four. The “better” two lakes bound downtown Madison’s isthmus. There’s a lot of fertilizer from the lawns and fields surrounding these lakes that assures a bloom of scummy, scungy algae earlier and earlier each year. The farther downstream you go, the dirtier the water. Still, water frontage is desirable real estate, so most of the fishing shacks, the modest homes of working people, and the weekend cottages that used to dot the shore here are gone now, taxed too high for any but the upper-middles to afford the luxury of walking out on a summer morning drinking coffee on their own pier. And most of the “substandard housing” has given way to lavish remodeling or reconstruction on the lake side of the road. Across the road, the houses with no frontage are older, shabbier, and still sport plenty of pick-ups and old Fords up on blocks on the lawn.

I called some acquaintances over there, people who happen to live on the lake shore, a couple who have been neighborhood activists who I hoped would be able to help in our work to find alternatives to the huge power line that’s planned for construction across the wetlands to the south. These people are neighbors by proximity — they live about a country mile from our house and not that many people live in between. In this case, the country mile is a mile north, plus another east, plus a half mile or so north again along the shore, but whatever… we all live in the same township and that’s the bond.

These people are no longer a couple. They’ve been separated for almost a year. Yesterday’s phone call was the first I heard about it. The husband was almost apologetic that his wife no longer lived with him. I meant to write about his distancing this morning, about the isolation he chose, we choose, and the isolation that comes to us with inertia, about the need to reach out to help, and the need to reach out to ask for help. There are people thousands of miles away that I am closer to than I am to these neighbors and some of them are troubled too, and I feel powerless to help beyond telling them how much I value their friendship and how I hope things get better for them.

And there is nothing in the telling that eases any of the pain I feel about my powerlessness, but maybe there is something in the telling that can bolster the feelings of my friends. But we are each bound by a sensitivity to the need for privacy, for isolation, a code of silence. Does reaching out require us to be able to walk through walls?

The circle of bloggers expands and some of us withdraw to other pursuits, the Worlds of Gamecraft or the resumption of activities interrupted, neglected perhaps, during a passionate period of blogging. The community online is refreshed like the township… some people move away, others move in, a general expansion takes place because there are more and more of us on the planet, and here online, there are more and more of us empowered with the tools to communicate.

The mediated nature of our communication shifts as new tools are developed, and the structures of our online communities change as people learn to apply the tools to their own circumstances and professions. Podcasting and Vlogging have emerged as powerful tools and they have brought back the performer/audience model in a big way. Virtual reality meeting spaces are emerging and creating a status distinction again between those of us who have the gear to participate and those of us who remain behind, constrained by our obsolete connections, status victims of Moore’s law.

A while ago Michelle Goodrich, a systems pro and a fabulous designer, published an article by Chris Locke about what it took to create the brilliant presentation he regularly delivers to blogs and web publications all over the net. At that point his toolset was sort of minimalist. He didn’t need a big pipe or a fancy PC to maintain interactivity. If you can believe him, and I do, he was accomplishing daily miracles on a dial-up connection. This may have changed.

Earlier this month Locke pointed to Tom Wolfe’s 2006 Jefferson Lecture. For over forty years, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby to I am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has shared his keen sense of status and community through essays and novels. He’s a peerless master of participatory journalism. His work on campus researching Charlotte Simmons led, I think to this observation about “political correctness”:

It does have one rather positive effect: it has become extremely bad manners almost everywhere in college to use racist slurs and to speak intolerantly about almost anybody.

Now, that’s a good thing: just simply increasing respect for all sorts of people. Of course, it has down sides, too. No longer does the premise of racial-ethnic harmony hold at all. Diversity means something else. Diversity really means dispersion, which you can see in any university dining hall. There is far from being any integration.

I’ve observed that when conservative people want to label something as egregiously “liberal,” they often trot out the phrase “politically correct.” For them, “politically correct” is a code phrase signifying an unwanted boundary condition on behavior. For Wolfe the phrase is more descriptive, more value free. These codes are all around us. Liz, at Granny Gets a Vibrator, recently wrote about breaking The Code of nuanced segregationism in the south. She says,

One of the trickiest things I had to do when I moved here from Berkeley six years ago was relearn how to decipher The Code. The Code is what “polite” white people–the kind who would never go around using the “N word”– use when they talk about nonwhite people in the south. I grew up in a different part of the south, in the 1950s and 60s, so I was raised to understand The Code, but I guess I’d managed to repress the memory during my 30 years living in Berkeley. As a result, when I first moved back down here, I ended up having some of the most bizarre and surreal conversations with the local white people, because I never could manage to understand what the hell they were really saying.

Us and them. We have our little status indicators, but the inclusive marker, the boundary condition, is set by the distinctions we create between us and them. When my neighbor retreated behind closed doors following his divorce, I think part of his condition reflected simply sadness, loss. But I strongly suspect his retreat also had to do with a terrible change in status; a prior status had so informed his self awareness that his new conditions put him in a group that he previously disparaged. How do you come to terms with that? “We’re not exactly flying a flag from the chimney with a big red D on it,” he said when I expressed my surprise that I hadn’t heard about the divorce. And I thought maybe we should do that. Maybe we need a code that will let the neighbors know that they should drop in with a pie and sit a while to help ease the loneliness and loss.