Brain Power: From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Tiffany Shlain

Tiffany Shlain has done it again.  The director of the acclaimed Connected and The Tribe movies has given us another slice of her vision that probes and provokes our understanding as it delights our senses and coaxes our smiles.  As is the case with all of Shlain's movies, you feel after seeing it that you saw something you already once knew, but needed to be reminded about, and now that you've seen it again the ideas and the rhythm are even more important than you realized.

The idea of Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks is the chestnut that the Internet is like our brain.  The metaphor actually goes at least as far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne and his character Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), who muses, "Is it a fact - or have I dreamed it - that, by means of electricity, the world has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time"?

It was short arc from the telegraph in Hawthorne's time to the web in ours - with McLuhan's global village in 1962 along the way - and, come to think of it, Shlain's Brain Power does have the memorable quality of a dream.  But it also has the focus of an important scholarly pursuit, and Shlain's thesis is that the Internet is not just like a human brain, but the brain of a human child.  This is because the human brain for the first years of its existence is hard-wired to learn - or, in neuronal terms, make connections.   Like links online, connections in the brain literally build, enrich, and expand it, with an initial strategy of the more links the better.

Part of growing up - for the web as a whole and the brain of every person - is pruning the links and connections that don't work, or don't work out well.  Shlain also raises concern about stress and overload suppressing the growth of good connections.   I've always thought that what we suffer from is not overload but underload, or not enough good connections and apps to make sense of what the world has for us.   That's why, when we walk into a library or bookstore, we may feel a fleeting tinge of overload with all the books before us, but it quickly passes because we have the navigational app to make sense of what we see, to know where to find the biographies, the fiction, and so forth.   Human beings, as William James, another Victorian, noted, are in the business of multi-tasking, or wringing order from the confusion of the world.   Overload can be exhilarating.

One thing's sure.   There's no overload or confusion in Shlain's marvelous 10-minute movie.   You'll feel exhilarated and pleased after you see the children and parents on the screen, the cool animation (a Shlain trademark) and world-class art (including quick takes of what famous illustrators such as Joel Iskowitz think the brain is),  the ideas that flow like a sparkling fountain on a summer day.   Take a sip - it will expand some of your good connections.

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You can see Brain Power, for free, right here.

In Defense of KONY 2012

KONY 12, the 30-minute documentary uploaded to YouTube on March 5, already has more than 56 million views - or averaging better than 10 million views per day.   The video is being talked about in mass media - I heard reports about it on WINS radio in New York City yesterday, and saw coverage on MSNBC and CNN in the evening.  It's everywhere.  And, surprisingly, the video has generated some controversy.

I say surprisingly because although anything that successful will usually attract some critics, KONY 12 is about the depredations of Joseph Kony, who for decades has forced boys into his military service in Uganda, forced girls to become prostitutes, and used kidnapping and murder to achieve his purposes.  Certainly anything other than gratitude for bringing such atrocities to the world's attention is surprising.

Meenal Vamburkar has summarized some of the criticisms on Mediaite.   They amount to "oversimplification" - a critique of the way the facts are presented in the documentary, and a claim that the 30-minute movie did not present all of the facts.

At least one critic has found fault with director Jason Russell's employment of his five-year-old son to carry some of the narrative.   We see the boy, wide-eyed, learning and responding to what his father very carefully and tenderly tells him about Joseph Kony.  If this was the sum total of the movie, then, yes, of course, this narrative would be an oversimplification, because you cannot tell a five-year all of those distressing facts.   But Jason's son is just a part of this movie, and in this role I thought his screen time was one of the most effective presentations I've ever seen in a documentary (it was reminiscent of the excellent documentary, Tiffany Shlain's Connected, about human connectivity, released last year).  All of us who didn't know about Kony before this movie are in effect in the same place as Jason's son.

As for KONY 12 not including important information, I would say it's ipso facto impossible for any 30-minute documentary to provide all significant information and details on any subject, even if everyone agreed on just what those details were.   So does this mean that no one should make a 30-minute documentary on an important topic?   Of course not, and the public's remedy for any missing information is to provide it.

Which gets us to what the movie wants to do, and wants us to do.  That would be, first and foremost, to learn about Joseph Kony.   The movie explicitly invokes Facebook and social media, and asks viewers to talk about Joseph Kony to the world audience that social media (or, what I call New New Media) have engendered.   The movie's critics are doing just what the movie wants, and if the heightened Kony profile leads to an end of his horrendous activities, that would be a great victory indeed for social media and the people of the world.

Four Important Documentaries in 2011

Looking back at 2011, I would say that it was a great year for documentaries.  Here are four that I had the pleasure to see, learned a lot from, and reviewed.  They are listed in date order, because ranking them would be apples and oranges.  The dates and links are those of my reviews, which could be earlier than official release dates, in cases in which I was able to see a preview.

• January 6, 2011:  There But for Fortune, Kenneth Bowser's vivid, incisive movie about Phil Ochs, second only to Bob Dylan in the opinion of many, certainly above Dylan in some ways ... more relevant than ever in view of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• January 18, 2011: Default: The Student Loan Documentary, Aurora Meneghello's movie about usurious bank practices regarding student loans ...  one of the main causes of Occupy Wall Street ... look for it on PBS in 2012 ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• August 14, 2011: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, known as the Yiddish Mark Twain, Aleichem showed - and this movie by Joseph Dorman shows -  a first-rate understanding of media on the level of  Marshall McLuhan, in the centenary of McLuhan's birth ... details on the movie's Facebook page

• September 2, 2011: Connected, Tiffany Shlain's triple threat movie, one part bio-doc about her father Leonard, one part history of media ala Marshall McLuhan, one-part about the growing interconnectedness of our world now expressed in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring ... details on the movie's Facebook page

Review of Connected: A Triple Threat Movie by Tiffany Shlain

Just saw Tiffany Shlain's new documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology via private online screening.  I saw an earlier version about a year ago, and was well impressed both times.

The movie is actually three in one -

1. Connected is a sagely and even delightfully presented story of our interconnectedness as a species - among ourselves, all living things, and the technologies through which we extend ourselves and give substance to our imaginations, plans, and desires.   In its warnings about what we can do wrong - such as Mao's killing of sparrows to improve harvests (sparrows eat seeds) which resulted in massive crop failure (fewer sparrows resulted in more locusts, also eaten by sparrows) - Connected is cousin to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.  In the hope it holds out for our new media, it is the kind of movie Buckminster Fuller might have made.

2.  Connected is a passionate biography of Leonard Shlain (1937-2009) - Tiffany's father - whose The Alphabet versus the Goddess (1999) argued that the advent of the alphabet over earlier forms of writing encouraged masculine thinking and dominance.   In its daring media determinism and historical sweep, the book put Leonard Shlain on a par with Julian Jaynes as a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan in provocative and mind-opening hypothesis.

3. But Connected is most of all an autobiography of Tiffany Shlain, who recounts her inspiration by her father, her struggle with his passing, her struggle to make sense of the curves the universe has thrown her, and in one way or another, throws at all of us.   That's what it means to be an intelligent being in this world, someone who doesn't just accept what she or he finds, but seeks to understand it, get a little on top of it, and thereby have a little bit more say and control over the course of our lives and the world.

Narrated by Tiffany Shlain and Peter Coyote. Animated bits by Stefan Nadelman (of Food Fight fame). Highly recommended for students of media - indeed, for students of life.

Connected opens in major cities in America in September - here 's a list - and Fordham University will be hosting a special free screening on September 25 as part of its Media at the Center McLuhan Centenary symposia.

Note added October 14, 2011:  I was at the premiere screening in New York City - at the Angelika Film Center - earlier this evening.  The movie's better than ever on the big screen, and the audience loved it.  It's become increasingly clear to me, in the past few weeks, that Tiffany Shlain's movie is the story of humanity, and recent history in particular, leading up to the healthy resurgence of direct democracy in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street - triggered, stimulated, facilitated by the advent of social media, or what I call New New Media.  Which is what I'll be talking about when I lead a discussion with the audience after the October 19, Wednesday, 7:15pm screening, at The Angelika.