digital digs

a pedagogy of planned emergence

Below Steven Johnson talks about emergence at TED in a presentation made in 2003 but made available on the TED site this month. His discussion touches on a number of things that were quite new in 2003--Technorati, the long tail--but are now familiar stuff. What's particularly interesting to me, however, is his approach toward emergence that looks at what might be termed a kind of human-scale feedback loop in emergent information systems.

What do I mean by that? Well Johnson starts by talking about city neighborhoods and asks, rhetorically, who plans a neighborhood? Traditionally the answer is that no one does, that neighborhoods emerge organically, and that attempts to simulate neighborhoods through planning often end up quite comic, as disneyfied versions of themselves. The organization of the web is likewise an organic process. For the most part, Google search ranks and the long tail linking/popularity pattern are not planned. Johnson ends his talk discussing Dave Sifry's efforts to shift the system somewhat and since then we have seen any number of attempts to game these search algorithms for monetary or political purposes.

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.

artilects and the new human

So I'm showing this video to my Cyberpunk Literature summer class. It's a BBC show dealing with cognitive science and developments of artificial intelligence. It looks at some particular activities and explores some of the ethical and political concerns around them.

It's an interesting video, and I think it will spur some good conversation with students. In particular I think it will connect well with Neuromancer and some of the other novels we're reading that address the idea of artificial intelligence. If anything, it's a good reminder that the questions explored by cyberpunk are still with us and are perhaps closer than ever.

packs roaming distributed learning environments

Read Gardner Campbell's recent post on Company Sense, by which he means a theatrical company or troupe and the type of relationships that can be built there. I've never been in a theater company, but I've been in a band and so I think I can understand the idea here of the kinds of connections and understandings that build between individuals through practice.

Also thinking about David Weinberger's thoughts about Anne Balsamo talking about her forthcoming book. All thinking in similar directions about "community," how we come together as producers and consumers of knowledge/media, as teachers and learners, as designers and users, etc: all of these dichotomies blending. There some particular binaries at work in these texts:

• Campbell critiques the distinction between hi-tech and hi-touch
• Balsamo calls upon C.P. Snow's two cultures and the use of collaboratories to move beyond them

Campbell speaks on how our notions of community rely upon direct communication, that the "hi-touch" relationship cannot survive the mediation by "hi-tech." This notion extends into learning communities. It is why we object to students with laptops in the classroom. It is what so many find difficult about the online course: building rapport with the students. This seems to run analogously to Snow's two cultures or at least as we have often characterized them. So if Balsamo calls for collaboration as a way of addressing technological challenges, Campbell remarks on the importance of developing particular affective relationships.

It's an old joke, but you could say that bands have their own version of Snow's two cultures: musicians and drummers. The point is that people with different perspectives, talents, and values elect to come together for a purpose... that's collaboration. And that they develop this "company sense" over time, through practice. Or they don't and they break up.

I approach this not in terms of companies or collaboratories but packs.

googled brains

As Jeff notes, many will write about Nick Carr's Atlantic Monthly piece. The article's title suggested more trolling than actually goes on, which is good (that said, it's a little sad that so many "respectable" publications feel like they need to troll to get attention). Then again, maybe I'm missing something.

Carr makes some cogent observations: "We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works." He also notes, "Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure."

So, yes, I agree the network shapes our cognition. I share Carr's concern that we ought to be mindful of our thoughts. However, I don't think the need for mindfulness comes from the development of internet technologies. I view mindfulness as a more basic virtue. Maybe it is harder to be mindful today, maybe not. I'm not sure how to measure the task of mindfulness.

I would say that as significant as the effect of networks might be on our brains, there has also been a significant impact on how we understand our brains. Carr mentions this, speaking about the shifting metaphors we apply to the brain. I suppose one might say all understandings are metaphors, inasmuch as one is willing to state "my love is a red rose" and "the speed of light is 180,000 miles per second" are both metaphorical statements. I don't think that's super-useful most of the time. So let's say that we understand our brains in a new way as well.

As I'm writing this, I came across Jon Udell's response to Carr as well. I think we are coming from largely the same perspective. We are seeing change. Yes, we should give thought to that change. No, we should not simply assume that change is bad (nor do I think Carr means to suggest that). Finally we can remember that when we think about "our brains on books" or "on writing," we can recall that those were not natural states either. We know all this business from Ong and so on.

In the end, the Atlantic piece is some typical mainstream magazine writing with a slightly provocative and misleading title that reminds us that we need to continue to be mindful of how we spend our time and our thoughts.

Yep.

distributed learning environments

Following up on Charles' questions, I wanted to delve further into this term. In a way it's an old term. You can find people using it more than a decade ago in reference to online education. Here's a definition from 1995 in Syllabus (via):

Distributed learning is not just a new term to   replace the other 'DL,' distance learning. Rather, it comes from   the concept of distributed resources. Distributed learning is   an instructional model that allows instructor, students, and   content to be located in different, noncentralized locations   so that instruction and learning occur independent of time and   place. The distributed learning model can be used in combination   with traditional classroom-based courses, with traditional distance   learning courses, or it can be used to create wholly virtual   classrooms.

Indeed, one can go back further than this, but the point is that the term historically referenced the erasure of distance and the asynchronous quality of what is now conventional online learning. However, my sense is that more recently the term has come to distinguish a set of practices and values from those of the conventional, walled garden CMS (e.g. Blackboard). The term also bears some relationship to personal learning environments, though they aren't identical as PLEs might operate within a single, customizable system.

In the call to which I responded for On the Horizon the definition of distributed learning environments is left quite open, though from my non-techie perspective, they fall into two categories:

microblog compositions

Following up on my earlier post on microblogging, I saw a thread on the TechRhet listserv regarding this subject: essentially how might one use Twitter in the writing classroom?

The general consensus in the thread was that there was a potential to teach concision in the 140 character limitation of the tweet. There was also extensive comparison to the haiku. Well, a tweet may sound like its a haiku on the classic subject matter of nature or spring, but that's about as far as it goes.

Writing a short message is not the same as writing a concise message or a haiku (btw, I would not characterize haikus as concise; there's a different aesthetic @ work there).

Fortunately our students don't need to be taught how to write short messages. They probably write more than their instructors. Obviously the 140 character limit reflects the important connection between microblogging and SMS. And as we know the point of texting is not to be concise! In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. In microblogging we say anything and everything b/c it's quick, easy, and free.

A couple other observations...

Jay Bolter, locative rhetoric, and eversion

Final post catching up on Computers and Writing on Bolter's keynote speech. The bottom line is that Bolter offers a vision of inscription (of writing/composition) that lies far beyond what any but a very small group of rhet/comp faculty, even within computers and writing, are able to engage. I think it shows us a world slipping away from us and really speeding away from what institutions are able to understand and do.

But I want to speak to some of the particular details. As I've mentioned before, in an interview with Arthur Kroker, Kate Hayles somewhat playfully identifies April 1994 as the end of postmodernism, signaled by the arrival of the graphical web browser. Bolter gives a related history, a history in which he played a significant role, in the development of avant-garde hypertext fiction and early web philosophy, inspired of course by William Gibson's kenning cyberspace. As Bolter notes, the early web articulated itself as a separate space whose utopian promise lay in its ability to allow us to leave history and materiality in meat space.

And I think we all know where that dualism leads, both practically and critically/theoretically. Nowhere especially useful.

open source and software ecologies

Continuing with the catch up on the Computers and Writing 2008 conference. I sat in on the town hall meeting issues of open source, particularly on the issue of standards for Open Office XML. There's a lot of interesting debate around this issue, including:

• Microsoft makes a boat load of money with proprietary office products and keeping people using them, but obviously only a fraction of the money goes into improving the product. Further MS's idea of improvement has to do with bottomline first and user experience second.
• One could make an ethical and political argument for supporting open source software.
• On the other hand, the average academic doesn't understand these issues, has other priorities, and just wants something that works.
• One could argue that Open Office and similar products are just dead ends anyway in the sense that they remain forever linked to MS-Office. The "real answer" is to recognize how word processors in general will be abandoned. E.g., Where do I do most of my writing? Right here in my typepad interface or in g-mail.

So I really have two observations to make...

Chomsky, universal grammar, and the cognisphere

In this Google Talk, Chomsky addresses a range of issues as he responds to questions. My interest here is in his discussion of the first question regarding his changing perspective on the concept of universal grammar. Chomsky explains that the current theory is that language developed 50K-100K years ago and that as such, whatever genetic mutation took place must have been fairly small. Specifically, he theorizes that something external to evolution, a principal of nature or "computational efficiency" allowed this small evolutionary change to have this dramatic effect. That small change, he says, was probably the capacity to carry out recursive enumeration, which basically means the ability to take two already constructed items, make a third item out of them, and continual that process iteratively.

In other words, the capacity to compose.

Now this is something I talk about at the beginning of The Two Virtuals as I think it is integral to understanding the role contemporary media networks play in cognition and subjectivity. Looking at anthropology and evolutionary psychology, it seems to me that the key is the recognition of the role of external conditions in the formation of language/symbolic behavior (and hence consciousness/subjectivity as we experience them). There's a cognitive-informational crisis that results from an increasingly complicated set of social and technological contexts in which humans are operating. As I discuss in my book, this can be seen in the archaeological record.

What emerges from this crisis is termed a "creative explosion." However we might also think about it as the entry of humans into the cognisphere.