It’s gotten some play, and its an interesting effort to reinvigorate the ancient, if hardly radical tradition of observing the sabbath by taking a day off. Ummm, by my calculation, it was the sabbath about a week ago!

But you can count me out this week. Here’s why:
1. I’m pretty sure there was already a Sabbath Manifesto. It is in the Bible (Exodus 31: 12-17). And on Wikipedia. And, it hasn’t changed much in about 1800 years. The Communist Manifesto I get — it was introducing or formulating a new way of understanding the workings (or failings) of capitalism, and envisioning a new world. So what good, exactly, is a manifesto for a thousand-year-old message?

2. There’s nothing Jewishly radical about celebrating the Sabbath. If anything, its just about the most traditional thing you could do (next to not worshipping idols, not making graven images, and not coveting your neighbor’s ass). It’s in the top ten commandments, for goodness’ sake. There is little new in this effort to raise consciousness about the sabbath and its relative goodness, other than the branding (which seems so perfectly not in the spirit of the sabbath that its almost laughable).

2a. Ironically, the Sabbath Manifesto looks a lot like this which has been around since 1987, and is scheduled to be enacted (GASP) TONIGHT! March 19, 2010. Two ways I can celebrate shabbat in one week? It’s like manna from heaven. Shabbat Across America is a project of the National Jewish Outreach Program, which describes itself in the following way:

NJOP consistently breaks the mold when it comes to promoting Judaism, using cutting-edge marketing techniques to convey the vibrancy of Judaism and to attract those Jews who are not currently being reached by conventional efforts.

(sounds a little like Reboot, frankly). But of greater concern to me is the overtly and avowedly religious operationalization of what “Jewish” means for the NJOP, and the ways in which the National Day of Unplugging echoes that, as well. Both cases seem like fairly narrow manifestations of what it means to be Jewish, as defined in particularly — and particularly religious — terms.

3. There seems to be a failure of ways to imagine a radical expression of Judaism in both cases, and both Reboot and NJOP end up promoting a deeply normative, Biblical conservative, and religious framework for being Jewish. This, to me, is a serious problem because, in this case, both efforts masquerade as radical, while promoting deeply conventional views of Jewish life and celebration.

True, it would be a “good thing” for all of us to unplug one day a week, and spend more quality time with our loved ones, to give the earth a break and so on. But I won’t be unplugging this weekend, thank you because I’m not interested promoting this whole Sabbath thing as something new or radical, as an opportunity for “outreach,” or even somehow innovative. It’s deeply, fundamentally, and even beautifully old school. But let’s not turn the sabbath into something its not.

Um…. I’m creeped out. really? you want me, a post-holocaust Jew to get my Jewish genes genetically tested because there is a correlation between my genes and my Jewish identity? And presumably, you expect there to be some value in understanding my genetic makeup as it pertains to my Jewish self?

Apart from the obvious creepiness that my genetic makeup is going to be cataloged by a for-profit corporation, and apart from the fact that the relationship between one’s genes and one’s health (to take but one example) is still really dicey, there are so many, many ways in which this is troubling or otherwise difficult to swallow, so I’ll focus here on just two:

1. I am pretty sure that my notion of “identity” is well-past the tribal-genetic-blood-quantum idea of identity that sits firmly in the maw of late 19th century pseudo-science. I believe that W E B DuBois was right, when he said that the “color line” was going to be one of the definitive phenomena of the 20th century, and I was hoping that here, nine years into the 21st century, we maybe figured something out that would allow us, at least, to ask more interesting questions about identity — particularly communal or “ethnic” identity — than what our genes (might) tell us. Most of my scholarly life (and my personal life, too) is about working AGAINST these archaic ideas about identity being tied to one’s bloodlines, and just because we now can find out a person’s genetic makeup doesn’t seem to me to promise a whole lot in the way of helping us understand our identities.

2. Even if we take a cultural constructionist approach to identity, adding a little about one’s genetic makeup to the mix seems to me not a bad idea, necessarily. I mean, our identities are constructed, in part, by social responses to our physical manifestations (whether one presents as tall, short, good-looking, a male or female, light or dark-skinned, and so on). Thus, genes aren’t completely beyond the pale of conversation, but they’re no more part of the conversation, it seems, than those other aspects of identity; Why not also convene conversations about height? about blonde-vs-brunette hair color? About left-handedness.

Apart from making people panic about their health (or the potential proclivities toward particular diseases), I can’t figure out why or how looking at one’s bloodline – from a strictly biological standpoint — is really going to help advance this conversation, or our understanding of what it means to be Jewish. Or tall. Or good looking. Or a man or a woman. Or, simply, human.

And one of the questions I asked almost everyone I met was: what are you doing, working in the record industry right now? I asked the same question of folks at majors that I did of folks at independent labels.

My interviewees offered a really interesting take on the record industry right now. Many explained that record labels are even more important now than they ever were because there is so much music out there — too much for any person to reasonably listen to — and that record labels play a curatorial role in the quest for the next great song.

As anyone who studies the challenges of the “information society” will tell you — the problem now isn’t necessarily a lack of information, but too much of it. And the challenge now is how to help people wade through the information they uncover to find the information they need. The commercials for Bing emphasize this over and over again, as they try to distance themselves from Google.

These record label professionals expressed a similar role for labels: how would you know what is good or bad, if not for the curatorial role of record labels, deciding which songs are recorded, which bands are signed and which albums are produced?

Its interesting, but its missing one important historical dimension: record labels started not to produce the best music they could, but to produce the most popular music they could. The idea was not to create a cultural standard of musical worth, but to make recordings that they could sell.

The “brand” of a record label speaks to a certain kind of product that they make. Sub-pop is different from numero group is different from EMI. And while they all claim a kind of curatorial relationship between themselves and their products, one of the obstacles in the future of the record industry may lie in its over-inflated sense of itself as a curatorial venture rather than the recognition that its only ever been a commercial one.

I was watching “sportscenter” last night. I’m not really a sports fan, and I can’t recall the last time I watched a sporting event on TV from start to finish. But, in watching highlight after highlight, I realized that I knew a little bit about a lot of players: Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Chris Paul. And that I, like a lot of people are “casual fans” of the NBA.

I imagine that every cultural phenomenon has a lot of casual fans. In all likelihood, they have more casual fans than hardcore fans.

And, I think, that the casual fans are where the balance lies. Hardcore fans (of any cultural phenomenon) are a gimmie — they’re going to watch everything or buy everything of listen to everything or read everything because they’re interested. The rest of us have limited time and attention for the intricacies of the phenomenon, but we’ll pay attention for big events (the Oscars, March Madness, end-of-the-year lists, and so on).

But because there are more of us casual types than the hardcore types, not only does the shape of viewers look like a power-law distribution, but, I would argue, the reporting does too — because it wants to attract people like me, and takes the harder core center as a given.

So: while the community might follow a power-law distribution pattern, conversations of and about the community might follow the exact INVERSE — treating me and the rest of the casual fans as the primary audience. What does this mean — if I’m the primary audience of something I don’t really care that much about?
I don’t know, but I’m beginning to think that there are tons of ways of re-thinking how communities work, and I’m just scratching the surface.

One of my current faves is Wordle, a pretty simple interface lets you type in text or blog-url’s or websites and it trolls the content of those sites, and presents a “word map” that shows which words pop up the most by representing them in larger fonts.

You want to know who the 800 pound gorilla of social networking is? Mashable’s visualization makes it pretty clear.

You want to know the relative popularity of terms in Borges’ “The Library of Babel?” Check it here.

How about the US Constitution?

Wordle is just the latest fling in my ongoing love affair with data.

Bachman noted that when he served as the Executive Director of the Bronfman Center at NYU, he asked on a number of occasions for the rosters of birthright participants so that he could reach out to them while at NYU. He was told “no.” In other words, Andy asked for the chance to reach out to the students of his university, and BRI said that it would not share that information with him.

This kind of attitude persists through the study, which suggests that the newly-branded “BirthrightNEXT” arm of the birthright juggernaut ought to be the primary provider of services and programs for birthright alums. Not synagogues or concerts. Not independent minyanim or libraries or book clubs or magazines: but birthright israel itself.

The idea being that only birthright, because it provided a “powerful Jewish experience,” could possibly sustain the allegiance and interest of its alums. Now…. imagine if NFTY or Young Judaea or the Solomon Schechter Schools approached their work with a similar attitude….

Maybe, in the spirit of the “economic contraction,” the idea isn’t an expansion of programs, but a contraction of them — or, has birthright israel become, to use a popular phrase that usually refers to unpopular corporations — too big to fail?

I think that #1 and #2, above are part of an ongoing conversation. I don’t believe that membership is either wholly on the shoulders (and feelings) of the individual, and neither do I believe that membership is wholly behavioral. There’s something in the middle, and, I think, organizations play a big role in that process. But they may be creating more problems than they’re solving.

So, here’s my idea (which came to me while reading Clay Shirky‘s book Here Comes Everybody):

I think that American Jews have a glut of community. A glut of community organizations and a glut of community language and focus. Here’s why I think this: Shirky points out that most groups map out along a power law graph — that means that a minority of people are highly active, but that most people are only marginally so.

And, I think the assumption in the Jewish world — mistakenly — is that the more people that are more involved, the better the Jewish world (whatever that is) will be. In other words, Jewish organizations are hoping to beef up the very top of the power law distribution curve. BUT, as Shirkey points out, communities don’t work like they.

It’s not whether they should or shouldn’t — but they don’t. And, perhaps, some of the bloat and stagnation that American Jewish organizations have been known to experience could (And this is my thinking, currently) be a result of too many interventions, organizations, efforts, money being leveraged against what seems to be a pretty compelling argument for a power law distribution of community involvement and engagement.

So, what if the “problem of engagement” wasn’t a “problem” at all, but something caused by much of the meddling intended to ameliorate said “problem?” What if the problem is not that there is too weak a sense of “Jewish community” but that the sense is too strong?

Sorgaz’s article lists eight steps to microfame. They’re pretty clever, and if you’re interested in that kind of thing, it would be worth a short experiment to see what happens if you follow Sorgaz’s programme.

But there’s a problem: There has always been microfame. There’s just more of it now, because there’s more infomation, and the pace of culture has increased — owing to the circulation of information — such that the turnover is greater, but the phenomenon is not new. To name a few off-line examples:

1. Jennifer Carol Wilbanks. aka “The Runaway Bride.” remember her?
2. Joey Buttafuco (and Amy Fisher)
3. John Wayne Bobbit.

And so on and so on. Frankly, if you troll newspaper archives dating back to the 19th century, you find case after case of this kind of accidental, fleeting, and — and here’s the kicker — at the time important fame. It’s fascinating, actually.

Sorgatz also argues that microfame is often (or at least occasionally) intentional, as in the spectacular case of Tila Tequila, who seems famous just for being famous, although she is certainly not a pioneer in that regard, either, she just figured out how to leverage myspace into a full-fledged career.

Microfame isn’t new, its just faster. So does the speed of culture matter? Is fast a distinct quality? Or, is it like Joseph Stalin said “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point attempted (but did not succeed, IMHO) in laying out the internal logics of how and why ideas or fads take hold in the ways they do. (what was the Tipping Point of The Tipping Point? Just wondering).

And to the next person who can develop an algorhythm for predicting people’s tastes, she will win a Nobel Prize…. Is there a Nobel Price of commerce or advertising? But all these tools are intended to help sort through all this informaion, because, clearly it is some kind of a “problem.”

To face the problem, there’s a new organization called the Information Overload Research Group. You can find them here. Its an interesting cast of characters facing an almost insurmountable problem. Namely: we are invested and involved in a culture that produces more information than it can keep up with, and the internet is too good a vehicle for disseminating said information. The “solution” to the “problem” of information overload is not a more managable email-reading system (which is what the IORG offers by way of suggestion). It might serve as a short-term solution.

But we (and that’s the biggest WE possible. All of us involved in the internet in whatever way we are) do not understand — not at all, not even close — what this information explosion means, or how to navigate it. Yes, one strategy might be to be more judicious with your email, but it doesn’t address the larger, looming questions like:

1. How do people make decisions in the midst of all this information?

2. On what or whom do those decisions depend?

3. What is the place of “information” in contemporary culture?

I don’t know. But I’d like to find out.

This seems particularly important with respect to positivisim. Where else do people entertain and then follow through with ideas that they know will fail? Where else do bad ideas get so much attention or press? Where else are people encouraged to do things poorly, or to invest time and money and energy in futile pursuits? “In the name of art” seems like a kind of cop-out, and reifies what I think might be most valuable about culture in the first place: its place in confounding or at least challenging the idea that everything ought to be contributing somehow to the greater good.

And yes, keener brains will recognize that my statement at the outset suggests that culture’s privileged position here is a kind of contribution, but I’m not making that argument, so give it a little wiggle room. Really, I think I’m arguing here that that is precisely the paradox of culture — that it’s role is to not contribute. You might call that a contribution, but I would call it something else — not quite a contribution, not quite a paradox, not quite something else, but I like it. I like things that fail, that seem futile. And in actualizing or expressing that futility, there seems something valuable in that.