digital digs

hunting and gathering in the digital age

I'm in the midst of reading Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. His discussion of the connections between the contemporary challenges of human information interaction (HII) and our paleolithic cognitive wetware, as articulated in evolutionary psychology and elsewhere, interests me and connects with some of the thoughts I've written here about paleorhetoric, as well as in The Two Virtuals.

Basically I understand Morville's point here to be this: our brains evolved to process information in the context of pre-historic hunting and gathering. Symbolic behavior came along later, piggybacking on this cognitive context.  This is sometimes called "information foraging" (Wikipedia).

This is a behavior that we are all familiar with, every time we make our way to the Google search box or find ourselves browsing. Perhaps we are looking for something specific that we've seen before (but forgot to bookmark). Maybe we're looking for some specific piece of information (e.g., how to cook wheat berries). Or maybe we are engaged in a less specific search: much like our foraging ancestors, we're just looking for something good to eat. How do we make our decisions? Are we regularly making rational choices along a decision tree that leads us ultimately to the best possible result?

Of course not. We're human. Post-human maybe in the sense that we don't (and never have) reflected historical notions of human-ness. But we are still human, still bodies. As Morville notes, "Since being happy broadens our thought processes and facilitates creative thinking, attractive products that make us happy can improve our ability to use them. In effect they work better because we work better. Small gifts (and flattery) can have similar positive effects. But why are we so susceptible to these superficial elements? How can such smart beings be so shallow?"

Those a good questions. My perspective comes from a different angle. I see this history of information interaction (going back to Aristotle) as operating on slowly developing ontologies and epistemologies, not to mention ethics! One result, as we all know, is that knowledge has been (is) viewed as fundamentally rational and organizable by rational means. The other result is that humans are capable of rational thought, that some portion of us (e.g. our souls) is purely rational, and that we should act rationally (that's where the ethical injunction appears).

As Morville notes, we are beginning to see ourselves in different, cognitive terms. In addition, I would add, we might begin to see information in different terms as well. It would not necessarily be to our benefit if we were strictly rational beings (if such beings are even possible, if rationality actually exists). Our feelings give us insights, as do our intuitions. We ought not to pretend we understand our wetware so very well.

So the question then becomes how to build information systems that better recognize our humanity. We see this (and fail to see this) in language all the time in its affective, supplemental force, beyond the "message." And the humanities as a constellation of disciplines is focused on such questions. It is in this arena that we have something to offer in understanding media, communications, and information.

Two Virtuals tag cloud

Inspired by Collin, I made this Wordle tag cloud of Two Virtuals.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and the power of radical transparency

Read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which is a NYT bestseller even though you can download it for free from his site. It's a Young Adult novel but it deals with some serious and interesting themes. Go out and read it. The novel is a powerful investigation of our civil rights in our "war on terror" and the role technology might play for good or bad. Along the way it provides a great history of civil disobedience and accessible explanations of surveillance and cryptology (and why you might care about such things). I'll be interested to see how HS teachers and schools respond to this YA novel. Doctorow provides usable instructions for circumventing existing school network security. Of course all that information is already available online but it's a little different when your teacher gives you the information, right?

So the book comes at you from two angles. First it deals with government brutality. Sadly it's not hard to imagine that if there were another terrorist attack of a similar magnitude to 9/11 that it could result in the abridgment of civil rights. It reminds us how important privacy is to freedom and how important encryption can be for privacy in the cognisphere. The second part, especially important for its teen audience, is seeing the role institutions play here. Maybe teens are all jaded and cynical, but not the ones I meet when they show up on campus. Doctorow shows students what we all know. Educational institutions present themselves as distributors of knowledge and information when it would be more accurate to understand them as guardians of knowledge and information.  There's a perpetual arms race between those who attempt to lock down networks in institutions and those who devise means to unlock them. Schools forbid cell phones, teachers keep computers turned off, professors tell students NOT to bring laptops to class: they don't do these things b/c they hope students will be able to access and communicate knowledge.

Anyway, that's all old stuff for us (though I think this novel is a great way to introduce these issues to teens, both in HS and college).

Importantly though, the other side of privacy is radical transparency. As Doctorow explains, the only kind of encryption that works is public encryption. Fortunately we don't live in a world like Little Brother in that Doctorow doesn't have to fear imprisonment for his novel or website. I'm presenting at Computers and Writing on open access pedagogy and will be talking about this. I don't teach in a public space because I have "nothing to hide." We all desire privacy. I operate in the open b/c it strengthens my teaching and scholarship. I mean here I am, 11 pm, having just finished this book, trying to figure out what I'm thinking right now.

(Perhaps such thoughts should be kept private, eh? Well I doubt anyone is forcing you to read this.)

The obvious part is that I can get feedback from others, and I won't ignore that b/c I really do value it. The second, maybe equally obvious part is the way that the demand to articulate my thoughts here pushes me. I can't just allow myself to settle for a thought resting in my mind.  However, openness has another important effect. It develops trust within a community.

Does this sound naive to you?

Think of it this way. In a department, all the profs have academic freedom. We teach how we want. It's unlikely that we share syllabi. Mine are available online at least during the semester in which I'm using them, but 90%+ of my colleagues are not. Our course evaluations are confidential (though rumors certainly circulate).

What does this accomplish? It often leads us sadly to imagine the worst of our colleagues. We operate in secret, insisting on our "freedom" to do so and the result is generally a broken community where our freedom manifest in our hiding in our classrooms and suspecting our colleagues of some unnamed infringement. Yep, I bet you always wondered what academic freedom was; well, now you know.

What would happen if it were all out in the open? I'm sure there would be some "discussion." But we'd all be swaying in the breeze, so to speak. In the long term, we'd have to learn to accept our differences. After all, we aren't going to dispense with academic freedom! Instead, we're actually going to use it to be public rather than private. The ultimate result of this transparency is a stronger privacy, a stronger, community-supported right to one's intellectual practices.

And that's what I think I get here. Not that everyone supports me of course. It'd be a pretty boring blog if everyone agreed with it. Hell, even I don't agree with everything I've written here over the years. That's not the point. Instead, I simply believe that by making public the things I'm thinking and doing as an academic, I strengthen the integrity of my everyday work, which by its nature often takes place in more private spaces.

when sorting things out is a bad thing

Richard Florida mentions Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort.  The essential premise of the book is that as America has become more diverse, Americans have sought out homogeneity by moving into communities with people more like themselves.

This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Maybe this is just an understandable product of increased mobility. Maybe it's people giving up on democracy. I don't know. Given a choice, would you prefer to live in a community with people who generally share your values, interests, culture? I wonder if this isn't more broadly a product of the social, economic, technoscientific revolution in which we are immersed. We are really at sea about the political, social, and ethical responses we ought to make about such matters.

It is pure coincidence that the same thirty years has seen the ongoing balkanization of our discipline? How pathetic is it that when humanities are in decline and we struggle to make ourselves relevant to students and the general culture that we avoid one another? that we gather in separate intellectual enclaves rather than communicating?

I'm not suggesting that we have to agree or even really get along (heaven forbid!). But how about figuring out a way of living that does more than just hope the rest of the world doesn't exist or won't call.

liberal facism

Been on vacation a good long while. Felt good. I'm starting my sabbatical, so I need to get my brain turning again. So here I am.

I read the Salon interview with Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism. I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. Maybe it is the partisan hatchet job people on the left seem to suggest it is. It does seem that we have gone well past the point where any serious political dialog can be had in this country. Maybe that's the clearest signal of fascism one could ever need...

Anyway, I am quite familiar with the idea of liberal fascism. Not surprisingly, my notions of fascism are heavily informed by Deleuze and Guattari, but a good succinct definition comes from Benjamin in his observation that fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics, as in life becomes lifestyle becomes lifestyle politics. Having spent my adult life on college campuses, having lived in Ithaca NY and spent time in New Age enclaves in the Southwest, I am quite familiar with lefty lifestyle politics and its micropolitical fascism. However, having grown up in suburban NJ and lived most of my life surrounded by churches, malls, and box stores, I am as familiar as most of us with the micropolitical fascism of the everyday American religious right.

By this definition of fascism, we are all inescapably fascist. In fact, we would look at WWII as the defeat of a nationalistic, eugenic, socialist form of fascism by a globalizing, technological, capitalistic form of fascism.

Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The next book I'm eager to read is Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Amazon). It's been getting a lot of attention. Time magazine has a piece this week proclaiming the novel as the next big thing. I've taught his short story collection Drown a number of times.

From the descriptions I've read, the new novel, like the short stories, has strong personal connections for Diaz. The Time article offers this brief character description from the novel:

"Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and who watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7, could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school."

The novel promises to take this idiosyncratic perspective (that is 100% Diaz) and use it as a launching point for a thorough examination of the processes of colonization and immigration. The book comes out Sept 6th, so I'll write more after then.

The Two Virtuals has arrived!

I'm very happy to announce that my book, The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, is now available from Parlor Press. My thanks to Byron Hawk, David Blakesley, Marc Santos, and many others who supported my along the way.

Here's the book description from the Parlor Press website.

In The Two Virtuals, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics.

 

William Gibson's Spook Country

Here is William Gibson discussing his soon to be released novel, Spook Country, which is a somewhat tangential continuation of Pattern Recognition as one of that novel's characters, Hubertus Bigend, makes an appearance in the new novel as well. The interview is interesting in its discussion of character and writing process, particularly the participatory role readers play through Gibson's blog.

The promise of Spook Country as a kind of continutation of Pattern Recognition makes me happy as I thought his last novel was one of his best. It was a decided departure from the more speculative/futuristic content of his earlier work in that it is set in the present and, as Gibson says in the interview, explores the cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11.

That said, it shares a common theme in exploring the intersection of technology and politics. As Gibson notes, technology is very rarely legislated into existence. That obviously shouldn't be taken to mean technology emerges in apolitical spaces. However it does mean that technological development can disrupt political order, a very Marxian observation, I would think.

Anyway, I thought Pattern Recognition did a great job of capturing the global media network, of giving us an affective experience with that network, and exploring the development of a kind of distributed cognition, so I'm hoping Spook Country will continue in this direction.

The Two Virtuals

                 

The second installment in my hopefully ungoing video blog series. A discussion of my forthcoming book from Parlor Press, The Two Virtuals. The video covers the intersection of the "technological virtual" with a "philosophical virtual" theory of materiality.

Long on tail, short on students

I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. It’s a quick read and an interesting book, though you can certainly get the main point by reading his Wired article and the many discussions of it around the web. However I do have a couple comments to make about the book.

First, Anderson begins the book by discussing the example of a 16-year old named Ben, who lives in the North Berkeley Hills.  Anderson uses him as an example of our potential access to a wide range of niche cultures and media, as well as our possibilities for producing our own media. Of course you need the right computer and software and video camera and ipod and cell phone and so on.  Anderson’s point here isn’t to occlude the digital divide. He acknowledges this is a kid growing up in an affluent context. The point, I think, is to see the possibilities.

I bring up the example because it makes me think about my own students. For the most part, they aren’t so affluent. Many really need to work to make ends meet. Still most have many of these devices and what they don’t have they can get access to on campus.  But I’m not quite seeing these students on my campus, at least not in large numbers. These would be the students who are not so locked into mainstream television, movies, and music.  These would be the students who watch videos and listen to audio and say, “I could make that.”  Obviously that’s not true of network television or Hollywood movies; that kind of media requires a tremendous budget. I’m looking for those students who want to participate in the emerging cultures of the blogosphere, YouTube, MySpace and so on, who want to use these venues to publish their own media.

Why am I interested in such students?

That’s my second point, which follows on observations I’ve made in discussing Tom Friedman, Dan Pink, and Richard Lanham. Anderson notes three forces creating the long tail. The first relates to what I’ve already mentioned: the increasing ease of production, particularly media production. Sure maybe you want to create a hit, but on the other hand maybe you just want to say what you want to say and get your message out to the right audience. Here is a space for writers, maybe “professional” writers, but maybe just good writers working in a space where amateur and professional lose their meaning.

The second force is distribution, getting your media to that audience. In part this is a technical problem, but it is also a rhetorical one. Designing media that will not only engage its audience but help that audience discover it in the first place. That’s a rhetorical challenge.

The third and final force is filters: an important part of these filters is the blog that gives us inside information and reviews. The task is to be able to inform and review but also to engage and entertain an audience. Clearly one cannot appeal to everyone or even most people. A blog is not Wal-Mart. In fact, the narrow focus of a blog is the foundation of its appeal. Developing that narrow focus takes rhetorical skill.

Admittedly, it may be difficult to imagine a paying job in these instances. That is something where we will have to wait and see what unfolds. However, if Anderson and others like him are right, there will be a demand for people who can devise engaging media and capture consumer attention, the scarce commodity in this equation.

So to answer my own question, I’m looking for students who want to shape a life for themselves in this space. In short, I’m looking for students like Anderson’s Ben who bring a native understand of these spaces. Maybe they’re coming. Maybe they’re already on campus but hiding.

We’ll see.