Up in the Old Hotel

                I’ll admit – for a while, I wanted to write this entry about #GamerGate, but that’s still such a shitstorm of differing opinions that I thought it best to write about something a bit less dividing, at least for now.

                So what did I decide on? Well, I went with the most interesting thing in my life right now: the book Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. Now admittedly, there are no computers in this book, but keep in mind that this class is Computers and Society, and this book is very much about society. In fact, I find it refreshing that there are no computers in this book, since it provides a nice contrast to the world of today, where everyone is texting and tweeting to their heart’s content.

                A bit of backstory of course: Joseph Mitchell was a reporter throughout most of the early 20^th century, writing mostly for the New Yorker about the people of New York City. Contrary to other famous journalists like Pulitzer, Woodward and Bernstein, and Cronkite, Mitchell didn’t report on news – he reported on people. Much of his career was spent just listening to the stories of anyone who seemed interesting – that quiet old man at the end of the bar, the person behind the ticket counter at the theater, even the clowns at the circus. Mitchell would listen to them for hours on end, and then he would publish their stories for the world to read.

                But the genius of Joseph Mitchell was how even when he was writing about the strangest people in New York, his writing never made them seem like characters in a story; they were always fully-realized people, and as I was reading this book (which I haven’t finished yet), I couldn’t help but lose myself in each story, and wonder just what it would’ve been like to meet one of these fascinating people. The best part is always getting to the end of one of the stories in the book and realizing that this was a real person – everything I had just read was factual.

                One story in the book depicts a woman named Mazie who ran a movie theater in the 1920s and 1930s. Mitchell writes about how Mazie would always seem like such a hardened woman to people she didn’t like, and yet every bum she came across in the streets would get money for food or a bed for the night. There’s no villain of the story, no big character drama or love triangle, there’s just a woman who sat in her ticket booth all day and got to know everyone who walked by.

                This is why I’m enjoying this book so much. Not just because it’s a way to visit a world long past (because seriously, New York in the 1930s would be such a cool place to live), but because it’s a way to get to know people who would otherwise be ignored. The woman in the ticket booth. The bum on the sidewalk. The waiter who just brought your meal while you were too busy texting to even say “thank you.” And in a world like ours, where everyone is always buried in their cell phones or tablets or smartwatches, uncaring of the world around them, that’s a rare thing indeed.

Why am I recommending this book? Because we live in a world where no one cares about the unimportant people. Because we live in a world where today’s college students are being told that unless they find the cure for cancer, they won’t amount to anything. Because we live in a world that sorely needs to be reminded that being unimportant is nowhere near the same as being uninteresting.