Apparently the FBI has just released a report on mass shootings, covering the last fourteen years. According to the news reports I’ve seen, for the first seven years, “mass” shooting incidents in the United States hovered around and averaged six per year, while over the last seven, they’ve averaged sixteen per year. While correlation does not prove causation, it is interesting to note that the increase in mass shootings does track rather closely the Great Recession from which we have not yet fully emerged. That is, business profits, dividends, and executive compensation have more than recovered, but employment and the salaries and earnings of everyone else have not. Theoretically, inflation has only increased by something like 18% over the last seven years, but for a large percentage of American workers, wages and salaries have not kept pace, and many are making far less than they did seven years ago. Many of those fortunate enough to hold their income levels or even get modest increases are faced with far heavier workloads… with no apparent relief in sight.

Another source of frustration, or pressure, if not both, is our “everyone-is-available-all-the-time” electronic communications system, where bosses and colleagues seem to want continual answers and updates.

Then there are the feelings of discrimination… and, no matter what anyone claims, racial, sexual, gender, and economic discrimination do exist. Add to that the feeling that the discrimination has gone on long enough, and that fuels anger even more.

There’s also another form of discrimination that is on the rise – and that’s the preference by employers for credentials, such as degrees, rather than experience or actual ability to do the job. Credentials don’t always mean ability, but any employer who picks greater ability with lower official credentials over “higher” credentials risks a lawsuit… and that’s frustration for both those with greater real-world ability and for perceptive employers.

Another source of frustration, I’m convinced, is the increasing tendency of American society, and perhaps many other more societies, to focus on instant gratification. The problem there is that some things cannot be obtained “instantly.” Fast food, instant internet access to entertainment of choice, overnight deliveries of goods – those are possible. Obtaining the skills to be a successful doctor, engineer, classical singer or pianist, or even a professional athlete takes time and a great deal of just plain hard work. Too many young people have never had the experience of learning through hard work, especially for any length of time… and all too many get frustrated when finally confronted with that necessity and they’re told that their efforts and their level of achievement are not yet acceptable. A significant percentage get angry, as if it’s the fault of the employer or the college professor that they can’t instantly master the skill in question… and some actually place all the blame on employer or professor.

Then add the growing and often crushing burden of student debt for recent college and professional graduates, some of whom can’t find jobs with enough pay to cover their loan payments.

Now…obviously, most people who feel these sorts of frustrations, and others I haven’t even touched on, don’t go out and shoot people, but I suspect that there are hundreds, if not thousands who’ve wished they could.

Meanwhile…

Over the last several weeks, my wife the university professor has been deluged with various new and additional academic requirements, touted by the administration as “improvements.” From my past, if limited, three years of teaching at the collegiate level and having watched my wife do it for almost twenty-five years, I’m convinced that absolutely none of these improvements have anything to do with improving teaching.

First was the requirement for rubrics in student syllabi. For those unfamiliar with rubrics, while the dictionary definition states that a rubric is a traditionally a heading or brief direction usually printed in red, in education a rubric has become an explanation for why something is required. At the collegiate level student syllabi used to be fairly short documents stating the course objectives, the assignments required to be read and by when; the dates for tests, and when papers, projects, performances were due; the grading policies and on what the grades were based. Now, the typical student syllabus runs fifteen to thirty pages. A sample “new” syllabus, incorporating the recommended rubrics, developed by the associate provost last year ran to almost sixty pages. Some students don’t even read that much in assigned readings, and many don’t even read the current syllabi. Exactly how is this near-contractual, rubric-laden syllabus, filled with the required extensive legalese, going to improve teaching or learning? It’s certainly going to require scores of additional hours on the part of professors, hours having little to do with improving the course or their teaching. What it does do is attempt to reduce the university’s legal exposure and shift it, as much as possible, to the individual teacher, especially if he or she doesn’t have a “contractual” syllabus.

The next bureaucratic assignment was to revamp all course descriptions and to modify all syllabi to incorporate ELOs, otherwise known as “educational learning outcomes,” in a format consistent with a pilot computer assessment program not yet used by any other university in the state. The format must be consistent in all fields of study, whether hard sciences, languages, art, music, physical education, business, pre-med, or economics, essentially attempting to shoehorn all disciplines into the same format and standards.

The latest pronouncement was that all documentation for professional evaluation will begin to be required in electronic format, PDF to be precise, in order to create greater efficiencies and reduce paper use. In addition, all job applications and supporting documentation must be electronic. Even as a tenured full professor, my wife is required to provide extensive documentation of her achievements annually, but the problem here is two-fold. First, most of that documentation exists in paper format and much of it will for years to come. This requires scanning and file conversion, plus learning additional computer programming skills, which is far more cumbersome and time consuming than making a simple paper copy. Second, since most senior faculty are also on tenure and promotion committees, when they review junior faculty for tenure and promotion, they have to read literally hundreds if not thousands of pages of documentation, documents that are virtually unintelligible on anything but either hard-copy paper or a full-sized computer screen. In the past, most professors would take the then-paper portfolios home and read them there, rather than stay late into the evening at their offices. Now, they’ll definitely have to stay, or print out paper copies for convenience. Even with the internet and WI-FI, trying to access the university computer system from off-campus is a tiresome and often frustrating experience.

From what I’ve observed, all of this, along with dozens of other smaller bureaucratic changes, has little to do with improving teaching, but more with bureaucratic ass-covering for the administrators. It’s all about making things easier and more efficient for the administrators. All of this paperwork – or the digital equivalent – does little to improve teaching, and just puts more work on the professors.

Interestingly enough, at least theoretically, administrators are supposed to facilitate making teaching better and to remove those barriers to better teaching, instead of imposing more non-teaching duties and requirements. Also, again theoretically, universities are supposed to be about teaching. So why are there more administrators, clerical staff, and athletic staff [some 57% of the total] among the 750 full-time employees than there are professors and full-time lecturers [43%]? Or, as my wife puts it, what does filling out endless forms about what she does and how she does it have to do with excellence in teaching? Especially when these bureaucratic requirements take so much time from preparation and teaching?

Or am I missing something?

Perhaps one of the most infuriating responses, especially when repeated day after day by students, subordinates, or someone hired to do a job, is “I know.” When a contractor tells a subcontractor that a line of bricks has been mortared in place crookedly, and the mason says, “I know,” the initial response of any contractor is probably, “If you know that, why in hell didn’t you fix it?” So, most likely is the reaction of a supervisor or employer when an employee responds to a correction with those same words.

My wife the professor, who teaches classical voice at the university, must hear that phrase a dozen times a day, because, almost uniformly, when she tells a student that the student has mispronounced a word [and no, in most classical singing, you don’t get to choose your pronunciation; there is just one correct pronunciation], failed to sing in rhythm, or sung off the pitch, the student almost invariably replies, “I know.”

Do people use that phrase because they don’t want to admit their ignorance? Don’t they understand that, if they admit that they know better, they’re really saying “I know I’m doing it wrong, but I didn’t want to put in the effort to do it right.”? Or that they don’t have the skill to do it right?

The bottom line is that if you “know” it, fix it… or ask for help fixing it.

There are any number of statements about numbers, including those that cite “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” which was a statement Mark Twain attributed to Disraeli, but which appears in none of Disraeli’s written statements. And then, there are statistics that are accurate, but which misrepresent when applied to smaller segments of whatever’s being characterized by those statistics.

Several weeks ago I was talking to my editor, who read me something from some publishing statistics that indicated that ebooks now represent about thirty percent of all book sales, but the rate of increase in ebook sales has supposedly slowed. After thinking about this for a while, I decided to analyze my own royalty statement [and given the way the figures are presented, it does take a certain amount of raw mathematical number crunching before one can analyze, because the figures are broken down book by book]. If I’m at all remotely representative of the F&SF field, that thirty percent number is way off for fantasy and science fiction books, since for my last royalty statement, sixty-five percent of my sales were in ebook format, and if one eliminates new releases the percentage is even higher.

In terms of revenue, especially for new releases, however, the story isn’t quite so clear. For new releases my sales in the first year are around sixty percent hardcover, and forty percent ebook. In addition, on average, I receive about sixty percent more for a hardcover than for an ebook – and that’s for the initial $14.99 ebook. So while ebooks are a good deal for buyers, even at the higher initial price, they’re anything but a good deal for the author in terms of new hardcover releases.

In the case of backlist books, though, the calculus reverses, especially in my case, because my backlist is so extensive that no bookstore, even the F&SF specialty stores, carries anywhere close to a significant percentage of my backlist, which means that readers can easily purchase ebook versions of books that are difficult, if not impossible, to obtain in print versions.

Generalizing from a sample of one is extremely risky, fraught with danger, and often highly inaccurate. Even a sample of seventy books [roughly the number of separate titles of mine in print – including omnibus editions] is an incredibly small sample, given the millions of books out there. And, on top of that, I have to admit that I’m probably not the average F&SF writer in terms of sales, because I have a pretty substantial backlist, and quite a few books on that backlist are hard to obtain in print format, which will pump up the ebook numbers to some degree. But other authors also have titles that are hard to find in print, and when my numbers come out at twice the supposed industry average, I have to suspect that what’s happening is that the sheer volume of cookbooks, how-to books, and other “genre” books that don’t lend themselves to ebook format or whose readers aren’t as interested in ebooks, for whatever reasons, are overwhelming fiction numbers, and especially F&SF numbers.

I don’t doubt the statistics, but I do doubt their applicability to fiction, and especially to F&SF, and that illustrates the danger of applying “industry-wide” statistics to a sub-set of an industry, because using correct, but misrepresentative statistics… well, that tends to fall into the category of statistics that Twain was describing.

Nonetheless, the numbers I’m seeing personally suggest that brick and mortar bookstores specializing in fiction are facing a very uphill struggle to survive… unless the present trends slow or change rather dramatically… or unless I’m incredibly unrepresentative.

One of the greatest addictions that’s ever struck a nation has engulfed the United States, and it’s making great inroads elsewhere in the world. It’s an addiction so powerful that it’s caused mothers to ignore and or neglect infants and small children, as well as fathers, if to a lesser degree, resulting in thousands of deaths, if not more. It costs businesses billions of dollars annually in lost work and pyramiding inefficiencies. It’s responsible for thousands of pedestrian and automobile accidents, and thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries.

What is the cause of this addiction? The common everyday cellphone. In its addictive powers, it’s very similar to alcohol. Just as many people can do without alcohol or limit themselves to a few drinks, so can many cellphone users. But a significant proportion of American cellphone users can’t. They’re on the cellphone every moment that they can manage, either talking or texting.

You don’t think it’s an addiction? Just look at the faces of those are addicts. There are two kinds. One kind gets a rush when the cellphone rings or indicates a text. You can see their faces light up in pleasure, and they can’t wait. The other kind is the hard-core addict. Their faces don’t light up in pleasure when their cell rings because it so seldom rings or buzzes or tweets or barks – because they’re never off it. The worst cases clutch their electronic heroin in a death-grip, never letting go of it. They text all the time, in meetings, in concerts, in the car, on the bus, on the sidewalk or in hallways, so wrapped up in their electronic world that the real world around them ceases to exist, except as an inconvenience through which they must negotiate in order to experience their electronic communications fix. They’re not all that far from inhabiting the virtual world postulated by James Gunn in The Hedonist – first published back in 1955.

Not only does this addiction cause deaths, but it’s also eroding the structure of human society, or at the very least, changing it drastically as electronic connections take precedence over physical and familial connections. College students no longer talk to classmates they see in classes or on campus. They don’t even see them because they’re so wrapped up in their cellphones. Last year, my wife directed the western U.S. premiere of an opera by Michael Chang [Speed Dating Tonight] which featured a scene in which a dating couple never talk to each other, but communicate by texting even when they’re sitting across the table from each other. The older members of the audience were amused and appalled. The younger members were amused, but scarcely surprised. But when electronic addiction makes it into an opera, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s anything but rare.

And yet, for all of the evidence and all of the addictive behaviors produced by the cellphone, very few people seem to recognize or want to acknowledge that cellphones do create addictive behavior in a significant percentage of users. And that’s denial on a societal scale.