Kyle Banerjee's Blog

I know I posted a picture of my new velomobile a few weeks ago, but I’m starting to get it set up the way I really like it. I’ve ridden it to the grocery, hardware, and local discount stores a few times, and I especially enjoy taking it out when the weather’s miserable.

It’s not often that people in cars are jealous of the guy on a bike when it’s stormy. However, when I pull right up to the entrance of a store when it’s windy and pouring rain, I see a lot of eyes wishing they could stay as dry as me.

Most recently added features to the velomobile — front lighting and a garage door opener. There’s no reason why pedaling in the rain should require the rider to get wet…..

Lately, there’s been an enormous amount of news coverage about a guy named James Kim. He was driving home with his family and got stuck in deep snow on a remote mountain road. They waited for help in the car, but when no one found them after a few days, James went out looking for help dressed only in a jacket and tennis shoes. His family was rescued shortly afterwards, but he got lost and died of hypothermia.

I think reporting personal tragedies in the media is generally in poor taste. My general position is that news outlets should not profit off peoples’ misery or pander to voyeurism. Pointing a camera in someone’s face when they are in despair does both of these things.

However, there’s more to it than that. It occurred to me that when Brezhnev died, there was a surprising outpouring of grief in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to dismiss the coverage as communist propaganda, but having talked to people who where there, I think the sentiment was real.

The funny thing is that Brezhnev was not well loved. He was unremarkable as a leader and as an individual. Yet people who had never met him and didn’t even like him were crying. Since the vast majority of people who were upset to learn of James’ fate never knew him, I’m thinking a similar dynamic must be in play now.

I can only come up with two explanations for this strange behavior. The first is that humans are empathetic creatures. That’s why people become deliriously happy after seeing an athlete or musician overcome with emotion after delivering the performance of a lifetime, and why people fall to pieces after seeing someone grieving at a funeral. Feelings are contagious.

Empathy alone can’t explain the whole story. For one thing, it doesn’t explain why people get weepy at sad movies. Why should people get upset about something that didn’t even really happen to an actor pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist?

Which gets me to the second reason. I think that even when a stranger dies, it puts people in touch with how they feel about being deprived of life. In effect, they mourn their own mortality. Likewise, for other sad or happy events, people naturally reflect on how that same event would affect them. Whatever the case, I feel bad for James and the Kim family.

Comments I’ve received about what I post here have gotten me thinking about why people create or read blogs. My best guess is that it’s because people are naturally curious and like to know about each other. The internet allows people to constantly be in touch, but it’s impractical for everyone to actually be yakking with each other all the time. Blogs allow a low intensity way for people to know what others are up to.

Those who blog because they believe others really want to know what they think are kidding themselves. People want surfing the internet to be fun. Few will read pages that are depressing, boring, full of controversial statements that upset them, or that can’t be digested in a minute or so. Also, you have to use some discretion because you never know who’s listening or what they’ll do with the information.

That might sound pretty restrictive, but it isn’t really — the rules that have governed society for millennia are virtually identical. No one likes to be around someone who’s always a party pooper, jabbers incessantly about things no one is interested in, intentionally provokes arguments, insists on turning every idea into a philosophical treatise, or introduces inappropriate topics. There’s no reason to expect that basic social rules depend on specific technologies.

Neither blogs nor any other new technology changes things as much as people imagine. To illustrate this point, the library world has been going nuts for the past few years over how “virtual reference” will transform services forever. Basically, the hullabaloo is about using instant messaging to answer questions.

It’s not a bad idea, but even most librarians seem unaware that virtual reference has been widely available for many years thanks to a fabulous peer to peer network technology. This technology is called the “telephone.” Gotta keep things in perspective…..