digital digs

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.

presidential economics: the irrational lure of rationality

Picked up on John Cassidy's NY Review of Books article from Richard Florida discussing the foundations of Obama's economic thinking as an attempt at a third way separate from classic liberal and conservative positions. Specifically the article reviews Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein and describes a move to incorporate the insights of contemporary psychology into economics, including conducting psychology-inspired experiments:

the experiments confirmed something most people outside of economics hadn't doubted for a moment: rational economic man, the all-seeing, all-knowing figure on whose shoulders much of contemporary economics had been constructed, was a purely fictional character. Faced with even simple sets of options to pick from, human beings make decisions that are inconsistent, suboptimal, and, sometimes, plain stupid. Rather than thinking things through logically, they rely on misleading rules of thumb and they leap to inappropriate conclusions. Moreover, they are heavily influenced by how the choices are presented to them and, sometimes, by completely irrelevant information.

No kidding.

Rational thought is impossible because it doesn't exist. Rationality is a concept that has attempted to explain, or more often judge, thoughts according to an ideological standard of how thinking should occur. In many ways rationality is like prescriptive grammar. That isn't to suggest that the practices and values associated with rationality are bad. I often strive to be rational, don't you?

The point is that rationality is not, and never really was, an attempt to understand how humans actually thought, made decisions, or acted upon decisions. I'd say we were never meant to function as "independent thinkers." We aren't lemmings, but we aren't shards of divine wisdom being led astray by our flesh either.

Obama the candidate

OK, well maybe I will find myself writing about politics more over the next couple months anyway. I'm a Obama supporter. Why Obama and not Clinton? Difficult question. I find their policies to be largely the same. I am somewhat surprised by the ferocity with which others cling to their candidate. The difference seems to be one of ethos and perhaps pathos: they have attracted support from different demographics within the Democratic party. That we know. We also know that Obama has attracted independents and brought out new voters.

I find it curious that 1/4 of Clinton supporters say they will vote McCain rather than Obama, while Obama attracts independents. But this is the sad irony of Clinton's campaign: a woman who would be, and has been, labeled an arch-liberal by her opponents has found success through the support of the social conservative wing of the Democratic party.

And who knew that democrats were so conservative? Well, only everyone living outside the US.

brief presidential observations

I've been meaning to comment on this Brookings Institute working paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowiz that I picked up from Richard Florida's Creative Class blog. Essentially the paper observes a shift in the nature of the working class and a related shift in voting habits in presidential elections since FDR.

The Brookings Institute piece maps the significant decline of working class democratic voters, especially in the South, starting in the sixties. As I understand the argument, from FDR through JFK, there were many working class southerners with conservative ideological values that associated themselves with the Democratic party. Maybe b/c of the Civil War but also b/c Democrats represented the material interests of white working class people.

Obviously after the 60s that changed.

eating locally

With spring promising to appear in the next few weeks in Central NY, we're going to make some real effort toward eating locally-grown food. This means the farmers markets here in Camillus and in Syracuse, as well as hopefully joining a nearby cooperative. There's also a farm about 30 minutes away where we can buy some meat for the kids. All that said, I'm sure that our supermarket, Wegmans, will still get a fair share of our money. I know there's a lot of eye-rolling at the presumed angst of being white and over-educated that supposedly drives this kind of decision-making. Add vegetarianism into the mix and one immediately assumes a holier-than-thou attitude is about to appear.

However, for me, the eating local thing comes more from curiosity and a desire to experiment. What would it mean to rely primarily on the what is nearby for food? Will the food be better? fresher? Will it be monotonous? (Looking at the list of produce at the local CSA, I'd have to say no to that last one. In fact, I'll be faced with figuring out how to prepare some new things.)

Professional Poetry?

The June 18th issue of Time magazine has an article on the attempts to popularize poetry. As Lev Grossman remarks, "In the hierarchy of cultural pursuits [poetry] sits somewhere just below classical music and just above clogging. Grossman points a finger at Modernism, when "poems become less like high-end pop songs and more like math problems to be solved. They turned into the property of snobs and professors." The article focuses on the Poetry Foundation, created by a $200M donation from Ruth Lilly (of Eli LIlly) and their efforts to popularize poetry.

OK, here's the thing. There's a multi-million dollar poetry business; it's called the gift card industry. What? You don't like gift card poems? Maybe you belong with the snobs and professors. If you want popular poetry though, you don't have to go any farther than your local Wal-Mart. Hard to swallow, I know.

Then, of course, there are "high-end pop songs" (and low-end pop songs). If, as Grossman suggest, the cultural popularity of poetry wanes during the Modernist period, then it coincides with the availability of recorded music. I won't go so far as to say that poetry was killed by rock 'n roll. Instead, I would suggest that if poetry wanes in the mid-twentieth century, its waning coincides with the rise of mass media.

Perhaps we can spend $200M to teach us to rethink what the poetic may be rather than trying to recapture a 19th century cultural practice, when, as Grossman opines, "Writers like Byron and Tennyson were practically rock stars."

building the 21st century student

You have perhaps already seen the cover story in Time magazine about the future of public education. As you might imagine, there's nothing particularly suprising in the article (It does start with an amusing anecdote about a Rip Van Winkle-type character waking up in 2006 after sleeping for 100 years to find the world very strange and alienating... except of course for classrooms, which look essentially the same as always).

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I find it mildly amusing that a conversation about revising American education and bring tecnology and information literacy into the curriculum is mainstream enough to be on the cover of Time but remains so controversial within schools that teachers and professors can put their careers at risk and/or find themselves ostracized for simply suggesting that they and their colleagues should have a conversation about the integration of technology.

Will Richardson @ Cortland Today

Will Richardson will be at SUNY Cortland today. He's giving a presentation in the library at noon and will be meeting with our graduate students later in the afternoon. I'm looking forward to meeting him. My colleague, Karen Stearns, tells me he's a dynamic speaker. I've followed his blog for a couple years, and it has always given me insight into the K-12 world, as well as introduced me to interesting tools and other things.

I'll be looking for my students to take the lead in our conversations, but I am interested in hearing Will's view on a couple issues:

• The issue of open source vs proprietary applications, particularly in the context of Blackboard's patent activity
• His vision of where we are going and how quickly
• What teacher education programs should look like now and in five years, especially in English

When did you realize the world was flat?

It's a question Friedman asks regularly in his book, and it's fun to answer, so I'll give it a whirl.

First a few a pre-flat inklings.

1990: I was an undergrad and working as a consultant and database designer for a small PC company.
Windows 3.0 had just come out. I'd been working there for two years, and I realized (as I started to use a mouse in earnest) that this PC thing was a whole lot easier than it used to be. I suggested that we should really think about a home user market (at that point we were mostly focusing on retail--point of sale and inventory control). There was this home security software and hardware and I had this idea of the PC as a "Fortress," securing the home and personal information. Anyway, for various reasons it wasn't to be, but I struck me then that something was going to change. Of course the Internet wasn't around, just a few lonely online communities. Two years later I'd be teaching writing in a computer lab. Five years later I'd be building my first web page. Had no idea then.

But it really hit home much later in

2003: My wife, Rhonda, and I had started a freelance writing business. OK, it was mostly her. She was working out of the home with our two kids, aged two and three at the time (sound fun?). We were on this website bidding for jobs doing editing and copywriting. The problem was that there were all these folks from Asia who would beat us to the bottom every time, and most of the customers on the site were looking for price. In the end, we did pick up a few clients who appreciated our level of expertise (though eventually the kids got older and Rhonda went back to work full-time as a community college professor).

Still it was an important lesson for me as a professional writing teacher. You can make a living as a freelance writer and/or editor. My sister-in-law does it. Obviously you need impeccable writing skills and the ability to produce clean copy. You need to work quickly and in a timely fashion. But your potential employers can get those qualities from someone on the other side of the world for a price way below anything you could do in America. Plus, if your in India making a couple hundred bucks a month as a writer, you're doing well and happy to work at that pay scale. Here you'd be disgruntled and cursing out your clients. Hard to produce your best work in those conditions.

And this is true not only for strictly freelance writers, but ultimately the case for any writers, as Friedman details in his example of Reuters (or is it AP, I forget) employees in India. Writing is easily flattened (in fact one might argue it is the first flattening technology). You have to have more, which, of course,is what Professional Writing seeks to provide--not just the ability to write but the rhetorical ability to make writing powerful.

More than ever developing that rhetorical ability will be crucial to our students' professional success. But then I think I've been saying that in a dozen different ways for the last few months.

some criticisms of The World is Flat

1. Friedman criticizes people my age and younger for not keeping up globally. As he tells his own kids, "Keep working. The kids in China and India are hungry for your jobs." In a way it's a good rhetorical strategy, for as much as it lays blame on his audience for the problem, it also offers them an obvious way to participate in solving it. While there may be some truth to this, I think there are a couple of key things Friedman ignores.
   
   If we have become a "lazy" society of fun-loving consumers, it is largely because our economy has demanded this of us. This is especially true of the generations to which Friedman points, who have been the targets of ungodly amounts of advertising. Here's the thing I don't get, if Joe and Jane America lose their jobs, they won't be buying the latest cell phone or the designer toilet brush or whatever. They certainly won't be calling help lines in Bangalore. This flat world relies upon consumers in America and Europe, and in order to be consumers, we need leisure time. Even if I keep my job, but I work 12-18 hours a day, like these folks Friedman discusses, I'm not going to have time to watch TV, even if I have TiVo. Of course the Indians and Chinese realize this. They don't see a future of serving American callers. They want their own TiVo. But if they are going to buy their own TiVo's and X-Box's and so on, then they are going to have to make more money and they are going to have to have the leisure time to use them.
   
   In short, they will have to become more like us.
   
2. There is a kind of contradictory rhetoric in Friedman's book. On the one hand, his framing argument about "Globalization 3.0" identifies the "individual" as the site of globalization. This runs through the book as he talks about opportunities for individuals to globalize and also how the individual must now be responsible for ensuring his/her own employablity into the future. However, there is also a clear nationalism to the book. Friedman always returns to "America" and how our country must respond to this challenge. I wonder if this is not an attempt at some rhetorical savvy on his part: to appeal to the right with a discussion of individuals and to the left with talk of national responsibilities.
   
   Either way, I say this. Regardless of right or left, you'd have to be a fool to imagine the state, let alone a corporation, will just take care of you, like a parent. In the book, Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, says his company can thrive "even if we never hire another American." I think this is the logic of any corporation. Corporations are no more American than money is American. However, the state has (or should have) the well-being of the nation as a primary concern, along with a concern for the well-being of the global community of nations. I would emphasize this aspect of Friedman's argument.
   
   
   Friedman compares our current crisis with the "Missile Gap" and Space Race of the late 50s and 60s. A curious comparison since the Missile Gap turned out to be vaporware. However the reaction at that time was a serious government investment in basic scientific research and higher education. For example, the SUNY system was constructed in the sixties. There was a massive hiring of tenure-track faculty and an influx of students. However this kind of funding and priority went away in the eighties. Not coincidently, this disinvestment occurs at the same time that a decline in scientists and engineers occurs. That is, Friedman notes it takes 12-15 years to educate a good engineer or scientist (starting in elementary school). That missing generation of science folks (my generation of current thirty-somethings) was in elementary school in the early eighties. What happens instead is the science becomes applied, commerical research funded by corporations (who in turn receive the subsidies once given directly to the researchers, right?). However, where funding in basic research returns dividends directly for the education of American students and the general benefit of society, academic entrepeneurialism benefits the researcher, the funding corporation, and perhaps the particular university in question. Then the corporation turns around and says something like Craig Barrett: we don't need America; we just need brain power. But the university will never say that, especially not the public university
   
3. As much as I agree with Friedman's analysis of the importance of science and engineering, we must heed Heidegger's warning about the "will to technology." Part of the danger of the flat world is that it has virtualized human labor, as Heidegger and more recently Arthur Kroker have warned. Seeing every problem as a technical problem is ultimately dehumanizing in a dangerous way. By the same token, we must not naturalize our Enlightenment/humanistic notion of humanity, which is just as historical/cultural/technological/ideological as any other notion might be. Of course Friedman does this with all this talk about the "individual," but I don't expect him to wade into that philosophical territory here, so I don't think of that as a legitimate criticism of this book.
   
   That said, I think that if we are to address the challenges of the flat world, we will need to rethink our ideas of subjectivity. We will need an understanding of materiality, technology, and human identity (both for communities and singular bodies) that allows us to create a future that improves the lived experience of human lives in an environmentally sustainable way. While Globalization 3.0 has many dangers, contradictions, and inequities, it is where we are moving and perhaps part of the growing pains of modernization.
   
   Here I turn to a more philosophical source, Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community:
   

   Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion--without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language--will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified.

   The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.

   I'm not going to go into Agamben today, but simply suggest that these passages offer a beginning point for imagining the role the humanities can play in building the "coming community."
   
4. OK, one last point, b/c Agamben reminds me. The second quoted passage, from the end of Agamben's book, comes from a section titled Tianamen. For Agamben, Tianamen Square represented a gathering of singular beings, individuals without a collective social identity, who had rejected the social-ideological identities offered by the state. It is interesting to me, because Friedman doesn't discuss Tianamen Square, though he makes extensive reference to the coming down of the Berlin Wall, which happened in the same year. Tianamen is a less optimistic moment certainly, but presumably more relevant for the Chinese economy that so interests him. China may have made strides toward being more competitive in the global marketplace, but in other areas not so much. While India is a more open and democratic nation; it is also a discontinuous nation where ultra-modern spaces bump against traditional ones.
   
   I'll have to think some more about this one.