Andy Berman 6 July 2009

I think the DC program has been underway for a month or two now. I’m not that optimistic about its success. The reasons you cite are a factor (as is the helmet issue they mention in the article), but I think the biggest obstacle is the limited number of stations. In Barcelona, there are 375 stations; in DC there are 10. Since the bikes can’t be locked up, you need to be taking a trip that starts next to one of the stations and ends next to one of the others. DC isn’t huge, but the chances still aren’t that great that your trip will work on SmartBike. All of the stations are in downtown, so for most people it’s impossible to use it for a trip that starts or ends at home.

There’s a station a couple blocks from my office, but I’ve only seen bikes on the street twice since it started. The city’s political leaders didn’t want to take the risk of rolling out a big program, but creating a small one would seem to just doom it to failure.

The oil tax sounds like a really sensible idea in some ways. Unfortunately, given the level of general economics knowledge and the sound-bite knee-jerk reaction news cycle, I think it would be political suicide: “We’re hurting because gas is expensive, and they want to tax it?!?!?”

While he may get a little too carried away with his metaphor, it does frame things in a way that I’m inclined to buy into. And I (like you, I think) long ago decided that this was going to be a major, epoch-making change in society. I think it will be positive on balance, though there will be plenty of unanticipated consequences (like the potential fragmentation of the public discourse).

In response to HCE’s comment, the degree of effort needed is important (after all, who wants to do something hard on their leisure time?). But I think the main distinction between those other activities and blogging, wiki, etc. is that these new interactive media are plugged into the social grid. If I were to go reengineer my wagon 15 years ago, I would be able to appreciate it, along with anyone who stopped by my house and let me drag them into the garage. If they weren’t expending too much energy pretending to be interested, they might give me an idea of how to further improve my wagon design. But when I post something on my blog, I’m usually building on something someone else did, and anyone searching for that sort of thing can come and see what I said, and maybe leave a comment or link to it. The person whose work I mentioned can even find out that I mentioned them. How awesome is this?

TV has been such a cognitive sink because there wasn’t anything as widely compelling and accessible to (almost) all. TV was compelling because, by providing stories and a common subject for us to talk about, it simulated the actual interaction and self-expression we crave with very little effort. The internet et al are providing a more compelling alternative for only slightly more effort, so I do agree that the shift will be pretty substantial over time.

More seriously, I think there’s a major problem with his argument that before the Internet, he was forced to watch TV all the time and not do anything constructive (“I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option.”). He may have been forced into the consumptive model of media, but he was still choosing to engage in that world of media. He couldn’t read a book and then pick up a pencil and write? Or walk around outside and talk to people or observe nature? Or paint a picture? Or go to the garage and re-engineer his wagon or bicycle?

The distinction between those activities and blogging, wiki-editing, etc, seems to be that the latter are done in front of a screen in the comfort of your living room — so perhaps what is more important to us is not whether or not we can participate and create, but that whatever we do we can do it with a minimum of physical effort and via some sort of intermediary that frees us from interacting with the real world directly.

He has an interesting point, but I think there is something even deeper and more interesting that he is missing. Why was that little girl looking for a mouse instead of looking out the window? Why am I commenting on your blog instead of talking to you directly?