the Scott Stein

Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. led me to HowManyOfMe.com, which supposedly tells you how many people share your name. It says that there are 115 Scott Steins in the United States. I believe that there are far more than that, since I know of several other Scott Steins. My doctor has another patient named Scott Stein, and I don't exactly live in a huge city. Not that I have any evidence, but I doubt 115 is correct. There might be that many just in the New York area. That is, after all, why I named this blog "the Scott Stein" and used the tagline, "There are lots of Scott Steins out there, but this is the Scott Stein, the one you're looking for." Or 115 could be correct. Maybe I overestimate the size of the Jewish population.

Anyway, back in 2000 when my first novel Lost was coming out and I was promoting it like crazy, the preponderance of Scott Steins and a writer's ego compelled me to write an essay called "I'm Number One," which originally appeared on my webzine When Falls the Coliseum. I am happy to report that after an absence from the top spot for a couple of years, I am once again number one where it counts (with my personal Drexel home page). Currently, my main competition includes another writer, a singer-songwriter, and some other people unfortunate enough to share my name. Here's the original essay:

I'm Number One!

I had a Twilight Zone experience the other day. My inbox contained a message from Scott Stein. I didn’t remember sending myself an e-mail, but it wouldn’t have been the first time, so I wasn’t frightened. Then I read the message. It said, “Hello. I am also Scott Stein.” It was signed, “Scott Stein, another author.”

A writer’s needy ego aside, I had even before this no delusions of the uniqueness of my name. There are a lot of us. I don’t envy people trying to find me in a phone book. And since you can’t throw a stone in most major cities without hitting a Jewish writer (not that you should be throwing stones at Jews or writers), it should not have been a shock that someone out there also pursuing the literary arts had my name. The other Scott Stein, it turns out, is primarily a playwright, and received a nice review in the San Diego Tribune for a recent effort. We exchanged cyber-pleasantries and both acknowledged that it was weird to find someone with the same name, then got on with our lives.

Now, if we were circus clowns, you might say that having the same name is professionally meaningless. Who knows their names anyway? Name recognition is important in other fields, but even professional athletes have it easier than writers do. There’s a young basketball player named Michael Jordan. Unfortunately for his bank account, no one is confusing him with the original. Pretty much everyone in the world knows what the MJ looks like. But we two Scott Steins are writers. Readers on the Web or in bookstores, not knowing much about us or what we look like, generally search for our name. Someone recommends a writer by saying, “You’d like Scott Stein’s new book … what is it called? Oh, well, just ask for his new book. They’ll find it for you.”

Great. You go into a store or search on amazon.com because a trusted friend told you how much fun Scott Stein’s writing is, and end up buying the new book by some other Scott Stein, the one about gardening. This does my own career very little good. Plus, you don’t have a garden. No one wins.

As the animated banner shouts to the world at the top of this page, my first novel is now available. In case you couldn’t tell, I have put lots of energy into building name recognition and an audience for Scott Stein. Not the other Scott Steins, but this one. This isn’t vain posturing or existential crisis (oh, poor me, I am not unique). This is real. If there are other Scott Steins out there feeding from the trough I am working each week to fill (don’t ask where that metaphor came from), it could cause problems. The kind of problems that could lead to headaches. No one likes headaches.

After a swig of Tylenol, I bravely ventured back on the computer. There were a lot of Scott Steins, it was true. Was a pen name necessary? I needed to know where I ranked. Trembling-with-fear fingers typed S-c-o-t-t S-t-e-i-n into google.com’s search. As had been the case a few months ago, I was expecting famous author Gertrude Stein and game show host Ben Stein to top the listing, even though they each only shared half my name. I was hoping for page two, or three.

I was number one! According to google, my new favorite search engine, Scott Stein, this one, is first. This was better than a Grammy. They give those to practically anyone. But google is serious business. And I was number one. Flush with my initial success, I checked other search engines. A toiletries marketing vice president somewhere had me beat on altavista.com, but I was a respectable number five, with no other writers ahead. Excite.com, on the other hand, did not list me for several pages. I think their programming is faulty.

This is a tale with a feel-good ending and a lesson. What I learned from all this is that it doesn’t matter what your name is, as long as you’re not the other Michael Jordan. Or Albert Einstein, Jr. Or, poor soul, some Neil Armstrong who not only didn’t walk on the moon but doesn’t have cable. Sharing names isn’t too bad, as long as the Scott Stein people are looking for is me. That is what I learned. That, and google.com is a marvel of technology unrivaled on the planet Earth.

We're all more fortunate than we often acknowledge.

Four years ago today my son was born. My wife started having contractions the morning before, July 24, and at 8:00 p.m. we went to the hospital. She wasn't "in enough pain," so they sent us home. By around 10:00 p.m. she was in lots more pain, so back we went. We walked the maternity wing hallways for a good part of the night, hoping gravity would convince this kid to come out. No luck. Hours and hours passed. Finally at 6:00 a.m. they gave my wife an epidural. Then we waited, had some meds to encourage dilation, waited some more. At around 3:00 p.m., the doctors finally concluded that my wife was not going to dilate, so they rushed her into the O.R. and performed a C-section. I had time to get into scrubs and play doctor. All went well, and at 3:44 we had a healthy baby boy.

Two days later, a cousin visiting us in the hospital, after hearing that my wife hadn't dilated and the baby had to be removed via surgery, innocently wondered aloud, "What did they do back in the old days, before modern medicine and technology?"

The answer was simple, if cold. One need only look at infant and mother mortality rates back in the good old days.

"They died," I said. "That's what they did."

I'm really happy that this will help paralyzed people. Is it wrong that I'm even happier that we're all on the way to having very cool super powers?

Some Americans like to throw around the word censorship, when in an effort to please its listeners, a privately owned radio station doesn't give the Dixie Chicks airtime, for example (please don't bother me with talk of public airwaves, as if any station has an obligation to play the music of every band out there). The Dixie Chicks are hardly oppressed, appearing on the cover of national magazines and making the rounds on television talk shows seen by millions of people.

In case anyone has forgotten what censorship actually is, here's a reminder from our friends in China, just in time for Independence Day. The good news:

The government tries to block Internet users from foreign Web sites of human rights groups and political activists, but many have found ways to evade the controls.

On the local evening news several months ago, a self-appointed expert was warning us of the danger of digital cameras. A similar story ran on a different station last month.

Our poor children, apparently, aren’t going to have memories of their childhood, because too many people are using digital cameras instead of traditional film cameras. The reporter nodded seriously while the expert flipped through a photo album, telling us it was a shame that our children would not be able to do the same when they grew up. He offered statistics as proof that people just weren’t using the old cameras. Of course, he’s right that people are using digital cameras instead of the old film ones, but so what?

When I consider how many "slides" my father took during my childhood, now sitting in a box somewhere, that no one will ever view, I can't get worked up just because some digital pictures will be lost to crashed hard drives. Some people will learn painful lessons about backing up their files, to be sure. But in total these losses might be offset by other pictures not lost to fire or flood, because they existed online somewhere. And these losses are certainly outweighed by the increase in total photos shot per person.

People are taking more pictures than ever--far more pictures--now that they don’t have to worry about wasting film (no, I don't have any data on this, but it must be true). They are ending up with far more pictures that they actually like. Many of these pictures are in albums in the computer or on CD and can be looked at on the screen. It isn’t clear to me that our children are being deprived of memories simply because the photo album they view is on a screen instead of being a physical object.

And plenty of these pictures end up being printed. Online services like shutterfly.com print out just the shots that you like at low prices. My wife is compiling physical photo albums at an unprecedented rate. The local news need not fear for my son’s childhood memories.

All of this seems obvious to me, and probably to you. But once again the experts and the journalists had no idea how the technology was being used.

The desire to have pictures of our children cannot be wiped away by a computer.

A couple of weeks ago Reason.com's blog Hit & Run had a bit about whether the ease of Internet research was killing serendipity.

For the past several years I have had my students read an essay by journalist Ted Gup called “The End of Serendipity.” In it he mourns the loss of spontaneous discovery that he enjoyed as a kid. Technology, he laments, has made it too easy for our kids to find what they’re looking for. Intellectual curiosity, it seems to him, is doomed. He remembers looking up salamander in the The World Book Encyclopedia as a boy:

I would invariably find myself reading instead of Salem and its witch hunts or of Salamis, where the Greeks routed the Persians in the fifth century B.C. ... In my youth, information was a smorgasbord. Walking past so irresistible an array of dishes, I found it impossible not to fill my plate. Today, everything is à la carte.

Students see through Gup’s error instantly. Serendipity hasn’t ended. It’s just moved from one delivery system to another. Unlike the experts who cling to a romanticized version of the past, the students have actually searched for information online. They’ve found themselves reading Web pages they never intended to discover. They’ve distracted themselves for hours on spontaneous intellectual adventures. They’ve experienced the same joy of unexpected learning that Gup says has disappeared. And they’ve done it without having to purchase a bulky and expensive set of encyclopedias that would be out of date before the ink dried.

The Gup essay is popular with freshman writing instructors and textbook anthology editors. Maybe it's because of some nostalgia for maddening hours wasted in university library stacks. Or envy at how easy research has become. After all, we had to walk uphill to school, both ways, and so should everyone else. Until the end of time. Or some anti-technology bias that is fashionable among some in the humanities, sure that kids these days with their loud music and their cell phones will be the end of civilization. Or something.

In any case, professors and journalists need not fear. Human beings are human beings, and intellectual curiosity and the joy of discovery cannot be wiped away by a computer.


Work Cited: Ted Gup, pp. 478-481 in The Blair Reader, edited by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 4th edition, Prentice Hall, 2001.