Hey there. This post is for 1 MA/3. If you're in 1 MA/4 please see this link for this week's class.
So, this Thursday I'd like to do a class looking at
internet freedom and activism or so-called "hacktivism". The easiest
starting point is to have you read this:
www.propublica.org/article/hacktivism-civil-disobedience-or-cyber-crime
In
addition, I'd like youou may not have heard of him to read something
about Aaaron Swartz. You may not have heard of him but he was the
inventor of RSS, helped to start Reddit and was one of the driving
forces against SOPA legislation (similar to ACTA here) in the US last
year among many other things. Anyway, he committed suicide almost two
weeks ago and there's so much material online it's hard to pick the
best. The easiest is probably this:
http://gawker.com/5975889/the-death-of-aaron-swartz-and-the-new-hacker-crackdown
This is Aaron's manifesto, definitely worth a read:
http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy
This is probably my favorite piece but it's pretty long and heavy on politics:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html
This is a great piece from a Harvard law professor:
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
More on the legal justification of the DOJ (department of justice):
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/doj-invoked-aaron-swartz-manifesto-to-justify-investigative-methods/
More on how this effects the legal rights of us all:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html
A decent article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/aaron-swartz-government-abuses-gilmor
Like I say, there's tons more. Pick and choose as time allows. See you Thursday
Monday, January 21, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Technology Presentation
Hey there, here's the two articles for next week's presentation in 1MA/4:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/fashion/02sabbath.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The reason for this change was a natural and predictable
back-breaking straw. Flying home from Europe a few months ago, I swiped a
credit card through the slot of the in-seat phone, checked my e-mail
and robbed myself of one of my two last sanctuaries.
At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.
In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.
Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?
Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?
As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we’ve always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.
Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. “What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)
“Who,” he then asked, “would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?”
THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.
For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.
“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”
Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like “the voice of the new,” I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.
On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.
I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.
GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.
But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can’t run five miles if you’ve never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.
Now it’s up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there’s little encouragement. “One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy,” he said.
But what’s wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn’t seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn’t get it all done in either, it certainly wasn’t because I was taking too much time off.
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.
I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
“Thanks!” said the boy.
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/fashion/02sabbath.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.
I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off. I was fully disconnected for 24 hours.At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.
In short, my name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.
Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?
Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?
As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we’ve always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.
Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. “What’s going on now is insane,” he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. “Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.” (Dr. Levy coined the term “information environmentalism.”)
“Who,” he then asked, “would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?”
THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.
For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.
“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”
Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like “the voice of the new,” I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.
On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.
I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.
GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.
But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. “It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can’t run five miles if you’ve never run at all.” Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.
Now it’s up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there’s little encouragement. “One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy,” he said.
But what’s wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn’t seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn’t get it all done in either, it certainly wasn’t because I was taking too much time off.
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.
I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
Antisocial Networking?
By HILARY STOUT
Published: April 30, 2010
“HEY, you’re a dork,” said the girl to the boy with a smile. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Just kidding,” said the girl with another smile. “You’re only slightly dorky, but other than that, you’re pretty normal — sometimes.”
They both laughed.
“See you tomorrow,” said the boy.
“O.K., see you,” said the girl.
It was a pretty typical pre-teen exchange, one familiar through the generations. Except this one had a distinctly 2010 twist. It was conducted on Facebook. The smiles were colons with brackets. The laughs were typed ha ha’s. “O.K.” was just “K” and “See you” was rendered as “c ya.”
Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins. (Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old boy involved in the banter above, has 418 Facebook friends.)
Last week, the Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers — a number that startled many adults, even those who keep their BlackBerrys within arm’s reach during most waking hours.
To date, much of the concern over all this use of technology has been focused on the implications for kids’ intellectual development. Worry about the social repercussions has centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. But psychologists and other experts are starting to take a look at a less-sensational but potentially more profound phenomenon: whether technology may be changing the very nature of kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyber-bullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced things about the way technology is affecting the closeness properties of friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, who has been studying children’s friendships since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer. Writing in The Future of Children, a journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative evidence is that the ease of electronic communication may be making teens less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what it does to the emotional quality of a relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. “These good, close relationships — we can’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships,” Professor Parker said.
“These are things that we talk about all the time,” said Lori Evans, a psychologist at the New York University Child Study Center. “We don’t yet have a huge body of research to confirm what we clinically think is going on.”
What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”
One of the concerns is that, unlike their parents — many of whom recall having intense childhood relationships with a bosom buddy with whom they would spend all their time and tell all their secrets — today’s youths may be missing out on experiences that help them develop empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial expressions and body language. With children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages — even kindergartners will play side by side on laptops during play dates — their brains may eventually be rewired and those skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and an author of "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," believes that so-called “digital natives,” a term for the generation that has grown up using computers, are already having a harder time reading social cues. “Even though young digital natives are very good with the tech skills, they are weak with the face-to-face human contact skills,” he said.
Others who study friendships argue that technology is bringing children closer than ever. Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of a book published last year called “Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships,” believes that technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., estimates that her 15-year-old daughter sends hundreds of texts each day. “I actually think they’re closer because they’re more in contact with each other — anything that comes to my mind, I’m going to text you right away,” she said.
But Laura Shumaker, a mother of three sons in the Bay Area suburbs, noticed recently that her 17-year-old son, John, “was keeping up with friends so much on Facebook that he has become more withdrawn and skittish about face-to-face interactions.”
Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’ ” — the bulletin board on Facebook where friends can post messages that others can see. Ms. Shumaker said she has since begun encouraging her son to get involved in more group activities after school and was pleased that he joined a singing group recently.
To some children, technology is merely a facilitator for an active social life. On a recent Friday, Hannah Kliot, a 15-year-old ninth grader in Manhattan, who had at last count 1,150 Facebook friends, sent a bunch of texts after school to make plans to meet some friends later at a party. The next day she played in two softball games, texting between innings and games about plans to go to a concert the next weekend.
Hannah says she relies on texting to make plans and to pass along things that she thinks are funny or interesting. But she also uses it to check up on friends who may be upset about something — and in those cases she will follow up with a real conversation. “I definitely have conversations but I think the new form of actually talking to someone is video chat because you’re actually seeing them,” she said. “I’ve definitely done phone calls at one time or another but it is considered, maybe, old school.”
Hannah’s mother, Joana Vicente, who has been known to text her children from her bed after 11 p.m. telling them to get offline, is sometimes amazed by the way Hannah and her 14-year-old brother, Anton, communicate. “Sometime they’ll have five conversations going at once” through instant messaging, texts or video chats, she said. “My daughter, with the speed of lightning, just goes from one to the other. I think ‘My God, that is a conversation?’ ”
Some researchers believe that the impersonal nature of texting and online communication may make it easier for shy kids to connect with others. Robert Wilson is the father of Andy Wilson, the 11-year-old sixth grader from Atlanta who was good-naturedly teased over Facebook. (Mr. Wilson quoted from the exchange to illustrate the general “goofy” and innocuous nature of most of his son’s Facebook interactions.) Andy is very athletic and social, but his brother, Evan, who is 14, is more shy and introverted. After watching Andy connect with so many different people on Facebook, Mr. Wilson suggested that Evan sign up and give it a try. The other day he was pleased to find Evan chatting through Facebook with a girl from his former school.
“I’m thinking Facebook has for the most part been beneficial to my sons,” Mr. Wilson said. “For Evan, the No. 1 reason is it’s helping him come out of his shell and develop social skills that he wasn’t learning because he’s so shy. I couldn’t just push him out of the house and say ‘Find someone.’”
Monday, January 14, 2013
Technology
Hey gang. Next up is technology, so here's the article for Thursday:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers?src=longreads
I'll try to copy and paste later, but it's much better to go to the site to read it as there's videos and stuff you might want to watch. Enjoy!
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-body-hackers?src=longreads
I'll try to copy and paste later, but it's much better to go to the site to read it as there's videos and stuff you might want to watch. Enjoy!
Friday, January 11, 2013
Bureaucracy
Hey guys,
I just got an email from a fellow teacher who was kind enough to translate an email we teachers were sent this week. Why would he have to translate an email sent to teachers of the Faculty of English. Simple. All email in the Faculty of English are sent in Polish only. Yep, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, I'm copying and pasting what I'm supposed to ask:
"Dear students,
I have been asked to remind all students that they need to be registered for this class (and all others) on USOS in order to receive a grade in the course.
If you have any further questions, please contact USOS coordinator mgr. Piotr Augustyniak at <august@wa.amu.edu.pl>."
Talk to you all next week,
Shane
I just got an email from a fellow teacher who was kind enough to translate an email we teachers were sent this week. Why would he have to translate an email sent to teachers of the Faculty of English. Simple. All email in the Faculty of English are sent in Polish only. Yep, you can't make this stuff up. Anyway, I'm copying and pasting what I'm supposed to ask:
"Dear students,
I have been asked to remind all students that they need to be registered for this class (and all others) on USOS in order to receive a grade in the course.
If you have any further questions, please contact USOS coordinator mgr. Piotr Augustyniak at <august@wa.amu.edu.pl>."
Talk to you all next week,
Shane
Friday, January 4, 2013
Travel & Tourism III
Hey everyone. Once again 1 MA/3 & 4 will be having different classes this week. 1 MA/3 will have me talking about the article posted a few weeks ago about the travelogue, while 1 MA/4 will have a presentation based on the following article:
It was just below freezing. Descending quickly, I tried not to look at the warren of rocks around me where some of the bodies, blasted by storms down K2’s slopes, were buried. Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air.
The experience must have affected one of my Balti porters, Abbas. Later, around midnight, he ran barefoot over the dangerous crevasses back toward the memorial, my porters told me, screaming to the dead that he belonged with them. A couple of the other porters held him down and brought him back to the tent. Believing he was possessed, they read the Koran to soothe him, but he bolted again.
At 5 a.m. when I lifted the flap of the mess tent, Abbas was asleep on a mat on the cold, stony floor, his hands and feet trussed. When he awoke, he was untied, and he rubbed his wrists groggily. He shook his head no when I offered porridge and green tea. He staggered outside to the porters’ shelter, a circle of blue-tarpaulin-covered stones where half a dozen porters were throwing down gasoline, lighting wisps of purple flames to warm themselves in the clear, freezing dawn.
I had finally realized my goal of reaching the base camp at K2, in the heart of the Karakoram Mountain range in northern Pakistan. Situated on the western edge of the Himalayas, the range contains one of the highest concentrations of the world’s tallest peaks. My purpose was to research a book about the climbers who challenge these slopes, and in particular an accident on K2 in 2008 when 11 people died, one of the worst disasters in Himalayan mountaineering history.
At 28,251 feet, K2 is almost 800 feet shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. But while Everest has been largely demythologized by a seemingly constant stream of films, books and magazine articles, K2 — distant and reclusive — has retained an aura of mystery and danger. Among hard-core mountaineers its ascent is considered a far greater achievement than Everest.
The statistics support this. In the 2009 season, some 450 climbers reached the top of Everest while none summited K2. But K2 is not just more challenging; it is also more deadly. By the end of the 2009 climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered K2, and at least 77 had died trying, a much higher casualty rate than for Everest.
I thought about this as I stood awestruck that cold morning, staring up at K2’s stark face, and contemplated whether Abbas, in his frenzy, understood something intrinsic about this mountain and its reputation for death.
MY journey to K2 had begun two weeks earlier in Islamabad, the hot, tumultuous Pakistani capital. It was a time of escalating insurgency in the Swat Valley, and tensions were high. The capital was locked down by roadblocks and terrorist threats.
Our hotel was the Islamabad Regency, a dark, unfinished structure along the main highway from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, with mold growing up the shower curtains. It was situated in a row of apparently empty villas whose boarded-up windows signified the unfulfilled promise of a city conjured from the wilderness five decades ago. Whenever we tried to leave the hotel, we were turned back by a guard with a gun swinging from his shoulder. “Unsafe,” he would say. It was sobering to realize that climbing K2 these days meant traveling through a country at war.
Our one main foray in Islamabad was to the Alpine Club of Pakistan, in a sunless room beneath the hot, empty terraces of the Jinnah Sports Stadium. There we met Javaid Iqbal, the honorary secretary, a kindly man with white hair and a moustache, who interrogated us about our plans and lamented the fact that the number of visitors had dropped precipitously this year because of Pakistan’s political problems.
In a normal season, he said, more than 80 full-fledged mountaineering expeditions and 200 trekkers came to the Karakoram, but so far in 2009 there were only 60 expeditions and 40 trekkers. The modern tribe of globe-trotting mountaineers willingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to brave the natural dangers of the world’s highest peaks, but shrank in the face of the more sinister threat of the Taliban. Who could blame them?
The Karakoram region had long attracted outsiders. Alexander the Great passed through in the fourth century B.C. It was part of the Silk Road. The first modern adventurers arrived in the 19th century when the British mapped out the boundaries of their empire and named K2 — K for Karakoram and 2 because of its place in a series of mountains noted by an assiduous surveyor named Thomas Montgomerie.
Back then the explorers traveled overland from Kashmir, but that route became more complicated with the partition of India. Today, the chief approach by car or bus is up the winding Karakoram Highway to Skardu, one of the principal cities in Baltistan.
We left just after midnight, creeping out of Islamabad in a white Toyota minivan, on a journey that would take us close to the Swat Valley. Our guide from Jasmine Tours, Sajjad Shah, said the unusual starting time was to ensure that we passed through the most dangerous areas at dawn, when the militants would be praying and less interested in looking for kidnap victims on the road. It was small reassurance.
I had come with a cousin, Andrew Ensslen, a 29-year-old architect who would act as my photographer. A Canadian who lived in London, he was the only person I could find willing to give up a month of his life to share the expense and dangers of traveling to K2. While we intended to trek only to the K2 Base Camp and not a foot farther, the six others in the bus were the real deal — serious mountaineers bedecked in the latest North Face equipment, wrists heavy with altimeters, their food barrels strapped to the roof. There were a German, three Poles and two Portuguese. They were planning a three-month campaign to Gasherbrum I and II, two peaks slightly over 26,000 feet near K2.
We stopped once at a gas station, where an armed guard sat sleepily; his job was to defend against militants. We stopped again at a truck stop where our own driver knelt with others in prayer. Fortunately, we left Swat unscathed.
When the sun rose, we paused for breakfast at Besham, a small town on the highway opposite a steep canyon where goats clambered on the hillside. After that, we continued up the Karakoram, on pencil-thin roads high above the lonely Indus River as Chinese trucks barreled past heading south. The bigger villages fell behind us, and the scenery became increasingly sparse: vast, open valleys strewn with massive boulders and scree, looking something like God’s building site.
After 27 cramped hours in the minibus, we reached Skardu, a dusty fort town of bazaars, stores and waterlogged polo fields grazed by cows. It is the main stop-off before the mountains, with hotels and second-hand shops for climbers, and it usually fills with mountaineers during the summer climbing season. The Indus flows past the town in a wide, flat valley; snow-topped peaks in the distance give a tantalizing hint of the heights to come.
We rested for a day, then left in jeeps for a seven-hour journey into the mountains. We drove through narrow green villages, passing beneath apricot and apple trees as scores of schoolchildren waved. Eventually, we drove up onto bleak, washed-out roads where, through the scratched plastic windows, we anxiously watched the steep mountainsides for rock slides. High up on the hillsides were caves, like black eyes watching us, where the local Baltis scratched out livings mining gems.
The poverty of the mountains was underlined the next morning at dawn in Askole, a small village of mud huts and bare-footed children. Our guide, Sajjad, selected 40 porters for us out of the hundreds who turned up eager — at $5 a day — for the work of carrying our backpacks and supplies as we set out on foot for the eight-day journey up the valley and onto the Baltoro Glacier.
Throughout our journey, I had been observing the culture of the climbers, noting their obsessive care for their expensive tents, boots and other equipment, their technical jargon and their personal goals. They had come to throw themselves at these peaks for a variety of compelling reasons — among them to explore nature and, in this lonely vastness, to explore themselves and their limits.
I had expected a collegial, communal, even romantic atmosphere on the trail. But climbers lead a mechanistic existence. They live by blisters and the grace of their stomachs, applying sun cream and drinking water like metronomes to stave off dehydration and to protect against the altitude. Each evening Dirk, the German, trooped off to his tent with an armful of water bottles, some filled with boiled water, some empty, and in the morning declared loudly with pride how much he had drunk and showed how many were brimming with urine. “Two liters again last night!” he said. How could I compete with that?
Beside the climbers, I got to know the other group of people traveling with us — our local Balti porters, drawn from the mud-brick shacks in the Karakoram foothills. There was the sirdar, or chief porter, our cook and his assistant, and then the troop of basic carriers and luggers. They looked thin and frail, dressed in dirty shirts, wearing too-short pants and sneakers or flip-flops. Some were teenagers, some as old as 60. There was no way, I thought, they could lift our belongings. But of course soon they were outrunning us, picking their way expertly over rocks and up slippery passes, carrying the tents, kitchen chairs, even our smelly gas stove, and stopping to help me as I took a wrong path or floundered numbly up the most difficult ascents. Come sunrise, they dismantled our tents. We had only to carry our day packs.
By late morning, halfway through our daily eight-hour slog, they would be waiting beneath willow trees or in the shelter of a rock, the stove lighted, chicken soup and green tea boiling, offering raisins and walnuts on a silvery tray. Usually, we were at the next campsite by 1 or 2 p.m., when the porters would put up our tents and the mess tent. We had the remainder of the afternoon to rest, read, recuperate and adjust to the new altitude, all the while gazing at the wondrous peaks around us. Ashok, our cook, a good-natured man in his late 30s, prepared excellent Balti dishes, slaughtering the three white chickens the porters had carried for us in a cardboard box.
THE first days of the trek were hot and lush. We passed through a series of campsites. At one of them, Paiju, beside a broad glacial river, we caught the first real glimpse of the big peaks ahead of us. Here, before the big push into the mountains, we stopped for a rest day for the porters, who celebrated by slitting the throats of three goats and preparing them for cooking, then dancing in the night outside our tents.
The next morning, we climbed up onto the Baltoro Glacier and from then on the days were colder and harder. The ice cracked beneath our boots, and we entered an avenue of immense mountains. Descending a hill, I slipped in the snow and dislocated a finger; it stuck out at a crazy angle and had to be rammed back into place and bandaged. At Urdukas, another campsite, we picked our way past the icy graves of three porters. It struck me that we were there for pleasure; the porters were putting themselves in danger for different reasons.
Here, even in June, the world around us was formed from deep snow and ice. At night, the water froze in my drinking bottle, and I slept wrapped in as many layers of clothes as I could put on, my head pressed against the creaking glacier.
There was beauty everywhere, though. One morning, when the sky cleared, we rushed from our tents to glimpse the shining face of Gasherbrum IV, a spectacularly beautiful mountain, at the head of the snowy valley. Often, we rushed out when we heard the roar of an avalanche and watched it pour down a nearby mountainside, frothing and bubbling.
Gradually, as we climbed higher, the air became thinner, and it was harder to breathe. My chest was pounding when, on Day 6, we reached Concordia, an amphitheater of mountains and a major crossroads where two glaciers and several trekking routes meet.
It was here that the mountaineers in our group split off, heading east to the Gasherbrums. Andrew and I took a difficult fork north for the punishing day-and-a-half journey up the Godwin-Austen Glacier to K2.
At about 16,400 feet above sea level, the base camp at K2 is a collection of multicolored tents on a long, gray spine of rocks beneath the southern face of the mountain. In the same month in 2008, it was packed with more than 10 expeditions, but now there were just two (at least while I was there). I roamed around.
In one kitchen tent, five Swiss climbers huddled together in big, puffy climbing suits, watching a film on a laptop. One of them, Olivier Roduit, 43, talked to me about the attractions of the mountains. When I asked him about their dangers, and about the Gilkey Memorial, less than half a mile from where we were sitting, he said: “I don’t like to think about it.”
He was used to death, though; in the mountains, he said, people die all the time. Nearly every climber I met knew some climber who had died, and all had had close calls themselves. A Spanish climber I spoke to later died on Gasherbrum II, and a South Korean woman I interviewed in Islamabad for my book died a week or so later on another mountain, Nanga Parbat.
But while the climbers understood the risks, I got the impression that clear-eyed realization extended only up to a point. I don’t think they really ever believed that they were going to die; otherwise they would never have come to the wilderness.
“Why do I do it?” Mr. Roduit said. “Because it’s beautiful. Sometimes I ask myself why I am here. In the morning I wake up and understand.”
Among the mountaineers I spoke to, there seemed to be a sliding scale: at one end were those who had a proper understanding of the risks (Mr. Roduit seemed ultra-careful), while at the other end were blithe thrill-seekers. While we were at K2 base camp, an Italian was high up on the mountain planning to ski down; a day or two later, he fell and died.
MR. RODUIT and his team were waiting for the rolling clouds to clear from their route to the summit, which they did on the morning after Abbas’s fright at the Gilkey Memorial. Andrew and I got our first good look at K2, and we could see some of the features that make it so dangerous.
K2 is 500 miles more northerly than Everest, and it is far more susceptible to sudden, unpredictable storms, which over the years have blown dozens of climbers from its ridges. Its sides are steep, even at the lower altitudes. On the ascent, there are tough sections like House’s Chimney and the Black Pyramid. Then, right near the summit, climbers have to ascend a steep ice gully called the Bottleneck and cross a horizontal ice face named the Traverse. All this while they are directly below a serac, a menacing ice cliff that protrudes over the edge of the mountain and through the years has occasionally crumbled, sending blocks of killer ice over the Traverse or down the Bottleneck. I thought I could see the serac’s distant, jagged outline against the blue sky from where I was peering up.
On the evening of Aug. 1, 2008, the serac collapsed, killing one climber outright and trapping 17 others above 28,000 feet in the darkness without ropes and — for those who were depending on tanks of supplementary oxygen — with failing oxygen supplies.
Some climbed down successfully. Others fell or wandered off the mountain to their deaths, or were killed in further avalanches.
Standing at base camp, I studied K2 in a reverie until I was shaken back to reality. There were dangers even here. Altitude sickness is a constant risk at this height, and Andrew had developed a severe headache. He was vomiting and could barely stand up. We were warned to get to lower altitudes quickly.
But Andrew could not walk out of these mountains — it would take another five or six days — and after a few hours we realized we had to call on my satellite phone for an emergency rescue by helicopter. It was a frightening and sudden end to our journey. A mile or so down the glacier at Broad Peak base camp, the climbers came out of their tents to help us clear a space for a helicopter landing, and set an orange H with plastic strips on the rocks.
We tipped our expectant porters, who lined up to bid us farewell. After four hours, two Pakistani helicopters appeared in the sky. We climbed in and were plucked off the ice. Three hundred feet below us the porters began the long trek home to pick up their next paying customers in Askole. The climbers in base camp turned back to their tents and continued their siege of the mountain. Andrew and I flew for an hour back down the Baltoro Glacier, swinging in our helicopter past some of the most startling peaks in the world — Masherbrum, Trango Towers. Eventually we reached the bare military hospital in Skardu, and then took a flight back to another hospital in Islamabad.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
The main Karakoram trekking season is late May to August and sometimes September. Most tours begin in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The trip takes planning and needs to be arranged through a tour company. Obviously there are risks involved in traveling through a country with so much conflict, so before you book, consult the State Department (state.gov/travel) for travel advisories.
The first order of business is a tourist visa, required of all United States citizens and costing $120. You can apply for one at the Pakistani Consulate (12 East 65 Street, New York; 212-879-5800; www.pakistanconsulateny.org). You will also need permission to travel to the northern areas in Pakistan, but the tour company will usually arrange this. It will also arrange for you to attend a briefing in Islamabad at the Alpine Club of Pakistan.
For a fee, tour companies will greet trekkers at the airport in Islamabad; provide hotel accommodation in the few places needed; transport trekkers to the Karakoram and back to the capital; and provide guides and porters for the trip into the mountains. All food is usually included. The tour companies accept individual trekkers, but traveling with a group cuts down the cost per traveler. Expect to pay $3,500 to $6,000 total for airfare and tour arrangements, not including the cost of gear and other travel-related expenses.
GETTING THERE
There are few nonstop flights from New York to Islamabad. Most connect in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, for a journey of 19 hours or more. A recent Web search on Kayak.com showed flights in late January on Etihad Airways, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, starting at $1,182. Other flights on multiple airlines ran closer to $3,000.
The journey from Islamabad to the mountains is usually made via the Karakoram Highway to Skardu, the chief northern staging point; the trip takes 27 hours. An alternative is a Pakistan International Airline flight from Islamabad to Skardu. Your trekking company can usually book this for you, sometimes for an extra charge, though flight schedules are often busy and depend on the weather.
TREKKING COMPANIES
There are several companies based in Islamabad that will handle arrangements, offering different levels of comfort and service. Prices are for traveling from Islamabad to the K2 base camp.
Adventure Tours Pakistan (92-51-226-0820; atp.com.pk) is one of the larger tour companies. It charges $4,992 — prices are set in U.S. dollars — for one person and $3,262 a person for a two-person trek.
Jasmine Tours (92-51-2615368 or 92-333-510-9753; jasminetours.com) charges about $2,500 for one person, $2,400 a person for a two-person trek.
Nazir Sabir Expeditions (92-51 225-2553; nazirsabir.com) charges $4,520 a person for a single-person trek and $3,400 a person for two.
Saltoro Summits (92-51-582-1775 or 92-333-517-6672; www.saltorosummits.com) charges $1,985 for single-person trek.
Shams Alpine (92-58-215-5218; shamsalpine.com) offers a two-person trek for $3,150 a person.
WHAT TO BRING
The trekking company provides tents and food. You should bring a sleeping bag good for extreme cold, and several changes of clothes, a main rucksack and also a day pack to carry water bottles and other day equipment. Your rucksack will be carried by a porter, but check the weight limit; you will be charged extra if you exceed it. Bring a sun hat, warm-weather clothes and lots of sunscreen; the going is hot and dusty at the beginning of the trail. Sunglasses are important. But also pack heavy coats and other clothes suitable for the subzero temperatures later. A satellite phone is a good idea. Also important: strong, waterproof hiking boots. Consult your trekking company for a full list of necessary equipment.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/travel/17K2.html?pagewanted=all&gwh=AAB6805EBCDB498B5E3F6946010D8728&_r=2&
Here's the copy and pasted version:
K2: A Trek to Danger’s Doorstep
Andrew Ensslen
K2, in the Karakoram Mountain range of the Himalayas, is the second-tallest mountain in the world. More Photos »
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: January 13, 2010
ONE day last June, I roped up to a porter and we leaped over crevasses
until we reached the side of K2, the second-tallest mountain on earth
and one of its deadliest. We scrambled up a few hundred yards to the
Gilkey Memorial, a rocky, sandy promontory at K2 Base Camp that
commemorates climbers who have died on K2’s dangerous slopes.
The air was loud with the sound of ravens. Metal mess plates, punched
with the names of some of the fallen climbers, tinkled gently in the
breeze. About 12,000 feet above us, the top of the mountain was hidden
by cloud; only its vast toes of black and brown rock were visible,
stretching down onto the frigid boulder-strewn rubble of the
Godwin-Austen Glacier a few hundred feet below. It was just below freezing. Descending quickly, I tried not to look at the warren of rocks around me where some of the bodies, blasted by storms down K2’s slopes, were buried. Parts of some of the bodies were visible, and occasionally I glimpsed a piece of ripped climbing suit or an old boot, or smelled something sickly on the air.
The experience must have affected one of my Balti porters, Abbas. Later, around midnight, he ran barefoot over the dangerous crevasses back toward the memorial, my porters told me, screaming to the dead that he belonged with them. A couple of the other porters held him down and brought him back to the tent. Believing he was possessed, they read the Koran to soothe him, but he bolted again.
At 5 a.m. when I lifted the flap of the mess tent, Abbas was asleep on a mat on the cold, stony floor, his hands and feet trussed. When he awoke, he was untied, and he rubbed his wrists groggily. He shook his head no when I offered porridge and green tea. He staggered outside to the porters’ shelter, a circle of blue-tarpaulin-covered stones where half a dozen porters were throwing down gasoline, lighting wisps of purple flames to warm themselves in the clear, freezing dawn.
I had finally realized my goal of reaching the base camp at K2, in the heart of the Karakoram Mountain range in northern Pakistan. Situated on the western edge of the Himalayas, the range contains one of the highest concentrations of the world’s tallest peaks. My purpose was to research a book about the climbers who challenge these slopes, and in particular an accident on K2 in 2008 when 11 people died, one of the worst disasters in Himalayan mountaineering history.
At 28,251 feet, K2 is almost 800 feet shorter than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. But while Everest has been largely demythologized by a seemingly constant stream of films, books and magazine articles, K2 — distant and reclusive — has retained an aura of mystery and danger. Among hard-core mountaineers its ascent is considered a far greater achievement than Everest.
The statistics support this. In the 2009 season, some 450 climbers reached the top of Everest while none summited K2. But K2 is not just more challenging; it is also more deadly. By the end of the 2009 climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered K2, and at least 77 had died trying, a much higher casualty rate than for Everest.
I thought about this as I stood awestruck that cold morning, staring up at K2’s stark face, and contemplated whether Abbas, in his frenzy, understood something intrinsic about this mountain and its reputation for death.
MY journey to K2 had begun two weeks earlier in Islamabad, the hot, tumultuous Pakistani capital. It was a time of escalating insurgency in the Swat Valley, and tensions were high. The capital was locked down by roadblocks and terrorist threats.
Our hotel was the Islamabad Regency, a dark, unfinished structure along the main highway from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, with mold growing up the shower curtains. It was situated in a row of apparently empty villas whose boarded-up windows signified the unfulfilled promise of a city conjured from the wilderness five decades ago. Whenever we tried to leave the hotel, we were turned back by a guard with a gun swinging from his shoulder. “Unsafe,” he would say. It was sobering to realize that climbing K2 these days meant traveling through a country at war.
Our one main foray in Islamabad was to the Alpine Club of Pakistan, in a sunless room beneath the hot, empty terraces of the Jinnah Sports Stadium. There we met Javaid Iqbal, the honorary secretary, a kindly man with white hair and a moustache, who interrogated us about our plans and lamented the fact that the number of visitors had dropped precipitously this year because of Pakistan’s political problems.
In a normal season, he said, more than 80 full-fledged mountaineering expeditions and 200 trekkers came to the Karakoram, but so far in 2009 there were only 60 expeditions and 40 trekkers. The modern tribe of globe-trotting mountaineers willingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to brave the natural dangers of the world’s highest peaks, but shrank in the face of the more sinister threat of the Taliban. Who could blame them?
The Karakoram region had long attracted outsiders. Alexander the Great passed through in the fourth century B.C. It was part of the Silk Road. The first modern adventurers arrived in the 19th century when the British mapped out the boundaries of their empire and named K2 — K for Karakoram and 2 because of its place in a series of mountains noted by an assiduous surveyor named Thomas Montgomerie.
Back then the explorers traveled overland from Kashmir, but that route became more complicated with the partition of India. Today, the chief approach by car or bus is up the winding Karakoram Highway to Skardu, one of the principal cities in Baltistan.
We left just after midnight, creeping out of Islamabad in a white Toyota minivan, on a journey that would take us close to the Swat Valley. Our guide from Jasmine Tours, Sajjad Shah, said the unusual starting time was to ensure that we passed through the most dangerous areas at dawn, when the militants would be praying and less interested in looking for kidnap victims on the road. It was small reassurance.
I had come with a cousin, Andrew Ensslen, a 29-year-old architect who would act as my photographer. A Canadian who lived in London, he was the only person I could find willing to give up a month of his life to share the expense and dangers of traveling to K2. While we intended to trek only to the K2 Base Camp and not a foot farther, the six others in the bus were the real deal — serious mountaineers bedecked in the latest North Face equipment, wrists heavy with altimeters, their food barrels strapped to the roof. There were a German, three Poles and two Portuguese. They were planning a three-month campaign to Gasherbrum I and II, two peaks slightly over 26,000 feet near K2.
We stopped once at a gas station, where an armed guard sat sleepily; his job was to defend against militants. We stopped again at a truck stop where our own driver knelt with others in prayer. Fortunately, we left Swat unscathed.
When the sun rose, we paused for breakfast at Besham, a small town on the highway opposite a steep canyon where goats clambered on the hillside. After that, we continued up the Karakoram, on pencil-thin roads high above the lonely Indus River as Chinese trucks barreled past heading south. The bigger villages fell behind us, and the scenery became increasingly sparse: vast, open valleys strewn with massive boulders and scree, looking something like God’s building site.
After 27 cramped hours in the minibus, we reached Skardu, a dusty fort town of bazaars, stores and waterlogged polo fields grazed by cows. It is the main stop-off before the mountains, with hotels and second-hand shops for climbers, and it usually fills with mountaineers during the summer climbing season. The Indus flows past the town in a wide, flat valley; snow-topped peaks in the distance give a tantalizing hint of the heights to come.
We rested for a day, then left in jeeps for a seven-hour journey into the mountains. We drove through narrow green villages, passing beneath apricot and apple trees as scores of schoolchildren waved. Eventually, we drove up onto bleak, washed-out roads where, through the scratched plastic windows, we anxiously watched the steep mountainsides for rock slides. High up on the hillsides were caves, like black eyes watching us, where the local Baltis scratched out livings mining gems.
The poverty of the mountains was underlined the next morning at dawn in Askole, a small village of mud huts and bare-footed children. Our guide, Sajjad, selected 40 porters for us out of the hundreds who turned up eager — at $5 a day — for the work of carrying our backpacks and supplies as we set out on foot for the eight-day journey up the valley and onto the Baltoro Glacier.
Throughout our journey, I had been observing the culture of the climbers, noting their obsessive care for their expensive tents, boots and other equipment, their technical jargon and their personal goals. They had come to throw themselves at these peaks for a variety of compelling reasons — among them to explore nature and, in this lonely vastness, to explore themselves and their limits.
I had expected a collegial, communal, even romantic atmosphere on the trail. But climbers lead a mechanistic existence. They live by blisters and the grace of their stomachs, applying sun cream and drinking water like metronomes to stave off dehydration and to protect against the altitude. Each evening Dirk, the German, trooped off to his tent with an armful of water bottles, some filled with boiled water, some empty, and in the morning declared loudly with pride how much he had drunk and showed how many were brimming with urine. “Two liters again last night!” he said. How could I compete with that?
Beside the climbers, I got to know the other group of people traveling with us — our local Balti porters, drawn from the mud-brick shacks in the Karakoram foothills. There was the sirdar, or chief porter, our cook and his assistant, and then the troop of basic carriers and luggers. They looked thin and frail, dressed in dirty shirts, wearing too-short pants and sneakers or flip-flops. Some were teenagers, some as old as 60. There was no way, I thought, they could lift our belongings. But of course soon they were outrunning us, picking their way expertly over rocks and up slippery passes, carrying the tents, kitchen chairs, even our smelly gas stove, and stopping to help me as I took a wrong path or floundered numbly up the most difficult ascents. Come sunrise, they dismantled our tents. We had only to carry our day packs.
By late morning, halfway through our daily eight-hour slog, they would be waiting beneath willow trees or in the shelter of a rock, the stove lighted, chicken soup and green tea boiling, offering raisins and walnuts on a silvery tray. Usually, we were at the next campsite by 1 or 2 p.m., when the porters would put up our tents and the mess tent. We had the remainder of the afternoon to rest, read, recuperate and adjust to the new altitude, all the while gazing at the wondrous peaks around us. Ashok, our cook, a good-natured man in his late 30s, prepared excellent Balti dishes, slaughtering the three white chickens the porters had carried for us in a cardboard box.
THE first days of the trek were hot and lush. We passed through a series of campsites. At one of them, Paiju, beside a broad glacial river, we caught the first real glimpse of the big peaks ahead of us. Here, before the big push into the mountains, we stopped for a rest day for the porters, who celebrated by slitting the throats of three goats and preparing them for cooking, then dancing in the night outside our tents.
The next morning, we climbed up onto the Baltoro Glacier and from then on the days were colder and harder. The ice cracked beneath our boots, and we entered an avenue of immense mountains. Descending a hill, I slipped in the snow and dislocated a finger; it stuck out at a crazy angle and had to be rammed back into place and bandaged. At Urdukas, another campsite, we picked our way past the icy graves of three porters. It struck me that we were there for pleasure; the porters were putting themselves in danger for different reasons.
Here, even in June, the world around us was formed from deep snow and ice. At night, the water froze in my drinking bottle, and I slept wrapped in as many layers of clothes as I could put on, my head pressed against the creaking glacier.
There was beauty everywhere, though. One morning, when the sky cleared, we rushed from our tents to glimpse the shining face of Gasherbrum IV, a spectacularly beautiful mountain, at the head of the snowy valley. Often, we rushed out when we heard the roar of an avalanche and watched it pour down a nearby mountainside, frothing and bubbling.
Gradually, as we climbed higher, the air became thinner, and it was harder to breathe. My chest was pounding when, on Day 6, we reached Concordia, an amphitheater of mountains and a major crossroads where two glaciers and several trekking routes meet.
It was here that the mountaineers in our group split off, heading east to the Gasherbrums. Andrew and I took a difficult fork north for the punishing day-and-a-half journey up the Godwin-Austen Glacier to K2.
At about 16,400 feet above sea level, the base camp at K2 is a collection of multicolored tents on a long, gray spine of rocks beneath the southern face of the mountain. In the same month in 2008, it was packed with more than 10 expeditions, but now there were just two (at least while I was there). I roamed around.
In one kitchen tent, five Swiss climbers huddled together in big, puffy climbing suits, watching a film on a laptop. One of them, Olivier Roduit, 43, talked to me about the attractions of the mountains. When I asked him about their dangers, and about the Gilkey Memorial, less than half a mile from where we were sitting, he said: “I don’t like to think about it.”
He was used to death, though; in the mountains, he said, people die all the time. Nearly every climber I met knew some climber who had died, and all had had close calls themselves. A Spanish climber I spoke to later died on Gasherbrum II, and a South Korean woman I interviewed in Islamabad for my book died a week or so later on another mountain, Nanga Parbat.
But while the climbers understood the risks, I got the impression that clear-eyed realization extended only up to a point. I don’t think they really ever believed that they were going to die; otherwise they would never have come to the wilderness.
“Why do I do it?” Mr. Roduit said. “Because it’s beautiful. Sometimes I ask myself why I am here. In the morning I wake up and understand.”
Among the mountaineers I spoke to, there seemed to be a sliding scale: at one end were those who had a proper understanding of the risks (Mr. Roduit seemed ultra-careful), while at the other end were blithe thrill-seekers. While we were at K2 base camp, an Italian was high up on the mountain planning to ski down; a day or two later, he fell and died.
MR. RODUIT and his team were waiting for the rolling clouds to clear from their route to the summit, which they did on the morning after Abbas’s fright at the Gilkey Memorial. Andrew and I got our first good look at K2, and we could see some of the features that make it so dangerous.
K2 is 500 miles more northerly than Everest, and it is far more susceptible to sudden, unpredictable storms, which over the years have blown dozens of climbers from its ridges. Its sides are steep, even at the lower altitudes. On the ascent, there are tough sections like House’s Chimney and the Black Pyramid. Then, right near the summit, climbers have to ascend a steep ice gully called the Bottleneck and cross a horizontal ice face named the Traverse. All this while they are directly below a serac, a menacing ice cliff that protrudes over the edge of the mountain and through the years has occasionally crumbled, sending blocks of killer ice over the Traverse or down the Bottleneck. I thought I could see the serac’s distant, jagged outline against the blue sky from where I was peering up.
On the evening of Aug. 1, 2008, the serac collapsed, killing one climber outright and trapping 17 others above 28,000 feet in the darkness without ropes and — for those who were depending on tanks of supplementary oxygen — with failing oxygen supplies.
Some climbed down successfully. Others fell or wandered off the mountain to their deaths, or were killed in further avalanches.
Standing at base camp, I studied K2 in a reverie until I was shaken back to reality. There were dangers even here. Altitude sickness is a constant risk at this height, and Andrew had developed a severe headache. He was vomiting and could barely stand up. We were warned to get to lower altitudes quickly.
But Andrew could not walk out of these mountains — it would take another five or six days — and after a few hours we realized we had to call on my satellite phone for an emergency rescue by helicopter. It was a frightening and sudden end to our journey. A mile or so down the glacier at Broad Peak base camp, the climbers came out of their tents to help us clear a space for a helicopter landing, and set an orange H with plastic strips on the rocks.
We tipped our expectant porters, who lined up to bid us farewell. After four hours, two Pakistani helicopters appeared in the sky. We climbed in and were plucked off the ice. Three hundred feet below us the porters began the long trek home to pick up their next paying customers in Askole. The climbers in base camp turned back to their tents and continued their siege of the mountain. Andrew and I flew for an hour back down the Baltoro Glacier, swinging in our helicopter past some of the most startling peaks in the world — Masherbrum, Trango Towers. Eventually we reached the bare military hospital in Skardu, and then took a flight back to another hospital in Islamabad.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
The main Karakoram trekking season is late May to August and sometimes September. Most tours begin in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The trip takes planning and needs to be arranged through a tour company. Obviously there are risks involved in traveling through a country with so much conflict, so before you book, consult the State Department (state.gov/travel) for travel advisories.
The first order of business is a tourist visa, required of all United States citizens and costing $120. You can apply for one at the Pakistani Consulate (12 East 65 Street, New York; 212-879-5800; www.pakistanconsulateny.org). You will also need permission to travel to the northern areas in Pakistan, but the tour company will usually arrange this. It will also arrange for you to attend a briefing in Islamabad at the Alpine Club of Pakistan.
For a fee, tour companies will greet trekkers at the airport in Islamabad; provide hotel accommodation in the few places needed; transport trekkers to the Karakoram and back to the capital; and provide guides and porters for the trip into the mountains. All food is usually included. The tour companies accept individual trekkers, but traveling with a group cuts down the cost per traveler. Expect to pay $3,500 to $6,000 total for airfare and tour arrangements, not including the cost of gear and other travel-related expenses.
GETTING THERE
There are few nonstop flights from New York to Islamabad. Most connect in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, for a journey of 19 hours or more. A recent Web search on Kayak.com showed flights in late January on Etihad Airways, the airline of the United Arab Emirates, starting at $1,182. Other flights on multiple airlines ran closer to $3,000.
The journey from Islamabad to the mountains is usually made via the Karakoram Highway to Skardu, the chief northern staging point; the trip takes 27 hours. An alternative is a Pakistan International Airline flight from Islamabad to Skardu. Your trekking company can usually book this for you, sometimes for an extra charge, though flight schedules are often busy and depend on the weather.
TREKKING COMPANIES
There are several companies based in Islamabad that will handle arrangements, offering different levels of comfort and service. Prices are for traveling from Islamabad to the K2 base camp.
Adventure Tours Pakistan (92-51-226-0820; atp.com.pk) is one of the larger tour companies. It charges $4,992 — prices are set in U.S. dollars — for one person and $3,262 a person for a two-person trek.
Jasmine Tours (92-51-2615368 or 92-333-510-9753; jasminetours.com) charges about $2,500 for one person, $2,400 a person for a two-person trek.
Nazir Sabir Expeditions (92-51 225-2553; nazirsabir.com) charges $4,520 a person for a single-person trek and $3,400 a person for two.
Saltoro Summits (92-51-582-1775 or 92-333-517-6672; www.saltorosummits.com) charges $1,985 for single-person trek.
Shams Alpine (92-58-215-5218; shamsalpine.com) offers a two-person trek for $3,150 a person.
WHAT TO BRING
The trekking company provides tents and food. You should bring a sleeping bag good for extreme cold, and several changes of clothes, a main rucksack and also a day pack to carry water bottles and other day equipment. Your rucksack will be carried by a porter, but check the weight limit; you will be charged extra if you exceed it. Bring a sun hat, warm-weather clothes and lots of sunscreen; the going is hot and dusty at the beginning of the trail. Sunglasses are important. But also pack heavy coats and other clothes suitable for the subzero temperatures later. A satellite phone is a good idea. Also important: strong, waterproof hiking boots. Consult your trekking company for a full list of necessary equipment.
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