Age of Distraction

Clay Shirky, "Here comes everybody"

2010-09-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am in the process of copying and pasting old blog posts from a Ning class blog. I don't want to lose these observations so here they are.

Clay Shirky does an excellent job of describing the dynamics of collaboration and group interaction in light of recent mass appropriation of online social technologies and tools. I found that his explanation of the "Birthday Paradox", as well as his categorization of "group undertaking as a ladder of activities..in order of difficulty...sharing, cooperation, and collective action" (49) helped me to better understand the incredibly complexity of large networks. There are practically infinite linkages and activities that can take place between members of groups and persons participating on massive sharing platforms or microblogging sites like twitter, yet somehow people manage to find a place or a group to fit into if they search deeply enough or if they know the right people (who know the right people.) These platforms, the relative openness of these networks and the kinds of communicative activities taking place on them allow for real time response to political crises and social events; they also unite people from all over the world and foster work on all kinds of projects at a pace and in a risk-free environment that many businesses and institutions cannot afford to do.

I also couldn't believe it when Shirky cited Wikipedia as a creation dating to 2001- which seems rather recent- and wrote about how it only took on its ".org" form a year or so later, responding to users protesting against its possible commercialization- that fact speaks to how much we make these tools a part of our lives and normalize our use of them in so many ways, including how we interpret the world (as continuously editable!) and how we work with one another.

Personally, I think it is great that CCTE classes and faculty/students here use so many of these online social tools to connect with one another; at the same time, it is rather stressful trying to manage all of these tools (including the ones I have to deal with at work and in life- basecamp, anyone? a CMS for life please?), remembering how we present ourselves on them and finding the appropriate context and tools for the task we wish to accomplish. On the other hand, we are given so many options of (re)presenting ourselves and sharing information to others and this can certainly be a positive thing: we have facebook for our friends, colleagues and family and connections between those people, linkedin for professional networking, online places where we can be an expert or newbie, and so many other resources that we may choose to partake in anonymously, yet still remain part of a "group". In some ways thinking about the Shirky book dispels some of the issues of "community" and "group" that we were having in class discussion last week. Shirky doesn't really mention community that much in his book; he is more interested in the flexibility and spontaneity of group formation. What is the difference between community and group? Is it really that important and is the difference merely semantic?

Which brings me to confess how I love the fact that I can tap into so many groups whenever I want, with as much or as little commitment as I can give (depending on the "promise" and "bargain" offered by the group.) Lastly, I am intrigued by Shirky's comment, "more is different." More may be different on the bigger scale; however, if we were to analyze users and participants on an individual scale, wouldn't we discover that individual Web use, sharing and networking are scaled rather humanly and predictably, and that individuals are still looking towards those with similar interests? I find it so amazing how Web sociality and these communications technologies play with our sense of scale- we are simultaneously part of the large and small, the massive network and the chatroom of twenty devoted members. It is the fact that so many people are contributing to the same places, sharing amongst each other and leveraging their networks around events or certain causes that things are changing.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2010-04-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

As I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I was moved by Jonathan Safran Foer's weaving of past and present memories of people affected by 9-11 and his decision to include accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden. Although he shows parallels in these stories of loss and trauma, we are aware throughout the text of the singularity and exceptionality of each one. Safran Foer describes the very personal suffering of individuals who must coexist with memories and physical artifacts of these events as they go about activities in everyday life- traveling, writing letters, lying to one another, sleeping and dreaming, looking at photos or letters. The characters of Oskar, his grandmother and grandfather attempt to make sense of their lives in a world that moves forward while they remain in a liminal state of doubt and uncertainty. The author captures the frustration they experience when they realize that fundamental, life-changing questions associated with these events will never be answered; thankfully, the author does not present a completely pessimistic picture of human relationships at the end of the book. Each character is presented with an opportunity to re-evaluate the most important things in their lives, and each chooses to engage with their memories in ways that are not self-destructive and directed exclusively inwards. They share their feelings with one another, and are less lonely for it.

I was also reminded when I read this book of my friend who traveled to Hiroshima and saw people’s shadows burned into walls as a result of the blast's impact. What are the artifacts of loss when everything is blown apart and people simply disappear, leaving shadows, and not bodies, behind? I believe our artifacts are memories, texts, photographs, ephemera that may mean nothing to some but everything to others- and as some of my peers have pointed out, Safran Foer offers us many ways of documenting or representing life as doodles or even blank pages.

Given the fact that I don't read much fiction anymore (no time, sadly), I found myself missing the psychological space of novels and the powerful combination of abstraction and intimacy that I experience when reading a good one. Until now, I have not experienced the novel as a way of reflecting upon the events of September 11, and I found that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (through the author's careful writing) existed within a medium that could offer a more thoughtful, nuanced, and honest way of representing the anger, confusion, and sadness of people coping with the aftermath than other representations (fiction films, mostly) or forms of documentation that I have encountered. Even though it may be difficult for many us to verbalize their thoughts in a completely transparent manner, due to physical and social limitations, it is possible to express ourselves more freely through writing, especially in memoir form.

Finally, I want to add that I enjoyed the experience of bringing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close everywhere throughout my travels in New York City. I picked it up at the Strand, and brought it to Bushwick, Washington Heights, into the tunnels of the subway, upstairs, downstairs, and finally to Teachers College. Like the space of memory, good works of fiction allow us to engage in one activity or be present in one space while absorbing ourselves in another. In some ways, the act of reading or writing a novel is to create a safe space for embracing affect that would, in other contexts, be prohibited or ignored.

Veblen & the Leisure Class - Working Hard or Hardly Working?

2010-04-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

"Conversely, the greater the proficiency and the more patent the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute." (32)

Below are some assorted thoughts on Veblen:

What characterizes the leisure classes is not simply the accumulation of material wealth, but the belief that they are entitled to such an accumulation (we discussed this in class w.r.t Mills.)

When I read about the wealthy, "leisure class" described in Veblen, I was immediately reminded of auction houses that deal in fine art or luxury property sales. I have never been to an art auction but I have seen them portrayed on television, in the movies, and heard stories about them from friends who work in the business of selling art. The truly wealthy send their assistants or whomever to bid for them- *perhaps this is where the phrase "to do so-and-so's bidding" came from, though I don't know. The leisure class with money aren't even present in these instances! They are doing what Veblen describes, namely, enacting the business of being wealthy and overseeing things from on high, without having to do any physical "labor". I wonder where the idea of large-scale anonymous donations or philanthropy fits in Veblen's idea of leisure class. Is an anonymous donation of a huge sum interpretable as a symbolic gesture of the leisure class' need to conceal their wealth? Is it part of the act of doing something they're "supposed" to do? (though I'm not entirely cynical; I believe that some people make generous anonymous donations for reasons of modesty, and also because they believe in various causes and social improvement.)

Another interesting point that Veblen brings up is the relationship of technology and tools to a societal transformation in ownership. Tools allow for greater productivity. More productivity means more things to accumulate and increased time for those in power to collect and buy stuff. Humans, and animals such as the bower bird, like stuff.

Of course what rich people buy is not necessarily "high-class"; however I'm sure they like the myth that we imagine for them, the greater myth we participate in where we collectively imagine that they buy rich things and have fun activities in the presence of other rich people. Meanwhile, the hardworking, long-suffering staff plot their revenge. Cf. the great movie by Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg, The Celebration (Festen) and countless other narratives in a similar vein.

Barthes and Mythologies

2010-04-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

"To keep a spatial metaphor...I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language object and a metalanguage...Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to have an elsewhere at its disposal. Meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning." (Barthes, 123)

To Barthes, myth is a "sign" (combination of signified and signifier) with a unique relationship to its corresponding words, images, or other representations of objects (signifier); the objects that they refer to (signifier); and a larger body of meaning, which he calls "signification". Unlike other signs, myths can have many physical and visual representations; these "forms" point to higher-order, abstract concepts like "imperialism" or "colonialism" or "justice" that attain the status of myth because their meanings are ambiguous, powerful, "motivated" (as Barthes describes them), and connected to our historical and physical contexts. A myth is a representation with deep, often disputed meaning(s) embedded in social norms, activities, objects and ideas, and as I understand it, deeply related to our beliefs and assumptions. A myth is "speech stolen and restored" (125)

My reading of Mythologies leads me to understand Barthes as a kind of detective of meaning. He uncovers the power behind cultural practices and habits that we often perceive to be superficial and popular distractions. The activities of wrestling and striptease are embodiments of spectacles of justice and fear, respectively. Barthes also looks at why these activities have attained such predictability in their execution/performance, and reliability in how they amuse or titillate audiences. As myths, these activities are both capable of fulfilling certain expectations of how we think we should act and behave, and also capable of instilling a sense of fulfilllment (for example, in the witnessing of naked "sex" in striptease, or the thrill and catharsis of seeing someone "deserve" physical defeat in wrestling). What can be considered mythic in our contemporary world according to his analysis? What cultural symbols, activities or representations have meanings that might possess this contradiction of "obviousness" and ambiguity? Barthes seems to consider myths as representations of meaning that can communicate at an individual, personal level, and also at a level that functions in the realm of a "collective experience" or memory. Are myths culturally similar or dissimilar? Can certain types of myths be generalizable across cultures? In other words, do cultures have the same myths? Or same types of myths? How do myths enter and exit in historical relevance? What does it mean to be living in a world where we can continually inscribe meaning onto objects- physical, digital, biological- through recontextualization?

Here are a few quick myth mashups for you. I really couldn't think of anything else, right now, except for Che (sorry Che for more representational abuse- but I use these as illustrative examples). Are myths more or less powerful now because of the sheer number of mythic representations out there, or because now so many more people can repurpose mythic representations, thereby evoking (I speak for myself) mixtures of disgust, reverence, confusion?? As I look at the images below I wonder, how, and why?!?!

$ = Power: C. Wright Mills and William Randolph Hearst

2010-03-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Over break, I visited Hearst Castle, one of many homes of the famed publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst. On the tour, I learned several interesting facts about his life: at the time Hearst built the estate, he controlled 98 business in various industries such as forestry, mining, and ranching, not including his publishing interests.

The estate was built during the start of the Great Depression, though Hearst himself was still receiving a high income of somewhere around 100 million dollars (I think- and that's 1930s dollars too.) Later on, as Hearst's fortune went under, he slowly sold his land holdings (at one point he owned something like 40 miles or so of California coastline!) and his businesses. I don't know the details of how the Hearst Corporation turned its finances around but I know that his family is still deeply involved in corporate ownership and management (W.R.'s grandson, George R. Hearst Jr., is co-Chairman of the board of the privately owned corporation.)

The example of W.R Hearst fits well with many of the sociological traits that C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite underscores: Hearst was wealthy, college-educated, the son of a landholding millionaire mining engineer and businessman. I liked how Mills tried to debunk the idea of a power elite (back then) of immigrants or upwardly mobile lower middle class people by using statistical figures of mostly white, upper-middle class and highly educated shoe-ins for corporate executive positions. His critique of the "entrepreneur" and "bureaucrat" are especially biting, and he argues that most people incorrectly identify the entrepreneur as an individual who has "all the risks of life about him, soberly founding an enterprise" while in fact "[i]n 1950, a far more accurate picture of entrepreneurial activity of the corporate elite is the setting up of a financial deal which merges one set of files with another. The chief executives of today to do less building up of new organizations than carrying out of established ones." (133) Certainly W.R. Hearst wasn't a poor man starting from nothing when he began his publishing enterprises. He had social capital, connections, and financial means, and inherited the first paper he started from his father (who was also a Senator). I wonder how true Mills' idea of entrepreneurship as a somewhat marginal (as in, not making an enormous amount of money) way to start a business holds today in a world of startups, and in a world where we tack "social" onto the term and use it to promote small businesses in developing countries through microfinance and microcredit.

Finally, another major point I got from C. Wright Mills is that survival tactic (and money-bringing one) of the power elite, especially the business power elite, is to consolidate and diversify. Mills points that out in his description of the kind of lateral, industry-influencing decision making that corporate executives must partake in:

"on the higher levels, those in command of great corporations must be able to broaden their views in order to become industrial spokesmen rather than merely heads of one or the other of the great firms in the industry. In short, they must by able to move from one company's policy and interests to those of the industry. There is one more step which some of them take: They move from the industrial point of interest and outlook to the interests and outlook of the class of all big corporate property as a whole." (120-121)

Clearly Hearst Corp. exemplifies this idea: it has broadcasting, radio, newspaper, magazine, and interactive companies; space satellites; a ranch; real estate holdings; and philanthropies- you name it- all over the world.

Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy

2010-03-09T11:08:00.000-08:00

Since this was a rather difficult reading, I will clarify major points of Schumpeter's argument for my benefit:

-Capitalism is characterized by fifty year business cycles

-Compared to classical economists, Schumpeter believes that the economic engine of capitalism is not pure competition, which operates on the principle that companies compete against each other to produce the most goods and services at the cheapest cost while making the most profit. In such an environment, the net effect of this type of competition is lowered prices, increased output and the edging out of those who cannot compete. Monopolies and advertising campaigns are cited by Schumpeter as examples of a kind of hybrid competition, where companies and industries create artificial & intentionally high (or low) pricing structures.

-The economic engine of capitalism according to Schumpeter is creative destruction, where
"the opening of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organization development from the craft shop and factory...illustrate the same process of industrial mutation if I may use that biological term- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." (83)

-Creative destruction is the process of innovation and creation of new business models that emerge from technological development (I assume through capital investment) and widespread societal adoption. In other words, new paradigms in production, distribution, and consumption that can be reproduced on a mass scale correspond directly to the profitability and increased output of capitalist institutions, industries and corporations, as well as wealth for individuals (and the middle class) . Although this ongoing process of capitalist development has its winners and losers, it is ultimately of enormous social benefit since it opens new markets (via new products and services) in the process of closing, or destroying, existing ones.

I am interested in the question of credit, technological innovation, and the economic engine of capitalism. Somewhere in this dynamic of boom and bust is the ethical question of how many people (in America and elsewhere) fail to save and spend too much on crap they don't need that is pumped out at exponential rates. What defines innovation for Schumpeter- I have the feeling that he means anything in the business world and in the global flow of economy that mysteriously leads to improved social conditions for people(? not sure about this though) Does his notion of innovation apply to efficient processes like the ways in which global networks of capital investment, credit flows, trade legislation and labor practices are currently managed? The rapid transfer of capital, money, goods and services characterizing our current situation has shaped production, distribution and consumption of the material and non-material (information) world in a way that perpetuates increased output rates and decreasing costs of labor and goods, but also in a manner that can't be sustained indefinitely.

The destruction end of this picture is bleak, especially when we consider environmental costs. I think that at this point we are all aware of the fact that there is so much more to consider regarding innovation for innovation's sake. I am explicitly critiquing the ideology behind "nanotechnology" or Moore's law, ideas that are characterized by the desire to build things that are faster and smaller without taking into consideration the fact that whatever is being produced might be more disposable. Technological innovations related to the speeding up production processes- or chains of distribution- can lead to little to no comprehension and reflection of decisions that consumers might make.

Walter Benjamin, film, and virtual distractions

2010-02-16T14:07:00.000-08:00

Benjamin has a very special concept of "art" in mind, if I understand him, when he discusses what happens to works like paintings and performances when they are reproduced on photo, film, radio, and made available to large audiences. They lose some of their special, place-based qualities and sensualities; however, some forms of technological reproducibility, like that of film, allow for new forms of perception and tactility. Benjamin rather beautifully describes the camera's ability to magnify and diminish space, allowing us to see multiple angles, and imagine ourselves in different times and spaces or witness to movements and motions that we would never be able to "in real life", like extreme slow-motion or even the act of montage itself.

We can see the same movie in numerous locations, given the right equipment, but the movie won't be the same, really- the context might change, and the movie itself can be spliced and re-spliced ad infinitum. Alternately we might see numerous locations in the same movie, and interpret the space-time of the movie according to narrative conventions.

I especially like this quote: "For contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment."

I wonder what he would have to say about the fuzziness or poor quality of television, video, web cam communication, and digital video online created by amateurs (not saying that all amateurs post poor-quality videos.) Is art an imitation of life? Is life an imitation of art? Are we looking for "reality" or photographic realism in art? Or are we searching in art for new forms of experience and perception, redefined by "technology" and then by profiteering?

Finally, here's an excuse to put this on my blog: I used to watch Concrete TV, a mashup show on public access tv during my late nights in college. Here's a Boing Boing link. Be warned as some viewers might be offended. There are a lot of women in skimpy outfits, excerpts of car crashes and scenes from kung fu movies. I am so happy that public access television exists, as it is a "somewhat" curated form of audiovisual experimentation for mass public consumption, unlike websites that aggregate everything like YouTube. One could argue though that YouTube videos are curated into channels by individual users.

Also a friend of mine introduced me to this really strange thing called chatroulette that's been the subject of recent press conversation. I guess it relates to this current discussion of new forms of experience via technology. The Fast Company article that I have linked to compares one's experience on the site to "psychedelic performance art territory". I wouldn't advise going on the actual site (well, that's my scholarly advice but you can do whatever you damn well want); in short you can webcam with strangers as if you had ADHD. The point of it isn't to have any kind of extended conversation, but to casually, and quickly, (like literally five seconds at a time) browse through random people sitting in front of their webcams. Life in the age of real-life digital manipulation.

Sharing the future data deluge

2010-02-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

Really fun and provocative reading dealing with how to interpret our information-laden future: subjects covered include data management and sharing, online collaboration, the cognitive and physical possibilities of machines, knowledge commons, among others.

Benkler:
The wisdom of crowds can be very helpful to an individual, especially when these individuals are part of an online network that where it is possible to see an organized stream or thread of their communication. I always joke about "outsourcing" my brain to the Web when I feel overwhelmed with school or professional work. I often outsource my brain to unknown "friends" and helpful individuals on listservs or newsgroups when I have questions about a given subject. I shoot them a question and I will always get a few varying answers that help me with decision-making. I don't know them but we are loosely affiliated. They are my personal search engine, humanized.

Benkler is right in stating that as citizens and consumers, and occasional producers of knowledge and information, we ought to value these activities and work towards a global (this is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong) knowledge commons that starts with economically and socially liberal societies. The altruistic motives of groups and individuals in the ecology of liberal information societies/economies is an important factor in how we might persuade policymakers to work towards creating an open online environment, where information can be shared and criticized, and where the democratic function of free expression can be protected and encouraged. Obviously we must acknowledge that the Internet and a networked information economy possesses a basic material infrastructure- cables and electricity and hardware production- and that many of these exchanges have everything to do with the transfer of material goods (e-commerce, for example), and that there might be many complexities along the way to this global information economy involving very real problems of resource management and sustainability.

Kurzweil:
"drugs today are genetically engineered specifically for the individual's own DNA composition. Interestingly the manufacturing process that's used is based on the protein-folding work that was originally designed for the nanopatrols. In any event, drugs are individually tailored and tested in a host simulation before introducing any significan volume to the actual host's body. So adverse reactions on a meaningful scale are quite rare."

This statement tangentially reminded me of an app that I read about online for the iPhone where people are asked to participate in helping biologists fold proteins. I like how ordinary people who might never participate in this sort of scientific research are asked to contribute not only because the tasks required of them might entertaining and cognitively challenging in and of themselves, but also because it extends to intrapersonal relations and health issues. In my mobile phone learning class, we discussed the use of "dead time", time where people might have previously been idle (such as waiting in line) as an opportune moment for establishing a learning environment and perhaps helping people engage in productive collaboration via their portable networked devices.

One scary thing about the Kurzweil reading concerns the notion that if our health systems, diganoses and prescriptions are so personalized, what will we do about synthetic or other viruses that may be constructed the same way? Will viruses then be so personalized that we won't have generalizable tools to combat them? The scales of data collection and management we have to consider may be focused extremely specifically, on individuals, or may cast a wider net onto mass populations.

The Fourth Paradigm/Cognitive Load/Beating a Dead Horse:
One theory that I've heard over and over again since coming to TC is that of cognitive load: perhaps the reason why we need to parse this information is simply because our minds can't handle it all. It's clearly been an issue especially with the endless proliferation of data in real-time monitoring systems. What are the critieria used to analyze data? What tools should be used to do this, and how might they be available? How might one design a data management system that is flexible and precise in query targets? Do I get to help answer these questions in any way, or is it up to computer engineer whiz-kids at Google, or other places that jealously guard their algorithms (built on the backs of our searches)? Since when does Microsoft of all people care about the open engineering and filtering of information? Bah.

Development, sustainability- mutually compatible?

2010-01-26T20:03:00.000-08:00

Collier: Bottom Billion
I feel like the Collier reading gave some me perspective on the other side of the trade coin (I have been exposed to mostly literature against "liberal" free market trade agreements/policies with developing nations, but maybe that's just my own bias towards what I want to read and not necessarily what I should read, namely, texts that explore multiple dimensions of international trade.) After I read the sections we were assigned, I have to admit that I did feel like a bit of a false expert in International and Public Affairs and Development. I wonder if all literature in I.P.A and that kind of writing is as "bullet-point" as Collier makes it to be: he creates a catchy term, the "bottom billion", and classifies the problems of developing countries into four common-sensical traps, like conflict or being resource-rich. It was refreshingly direct in its prescriptions, shall I say.

Collier gets down and dirty by advocating external control- essentially occupation- of rogue states. Do I agree with this? Some countries, like Somalia, or Sudan, are completely out of control and have been in civil warfare for decades. Should there be more multilateral effort to control places like this? Collier rightly points out that his position might be interpreted as a neocolonial one. The word "security" is such a damned word at this point, especially in light of the idea of a secure Iraq or other countries with semi-functioning governments that were later intentionally destabilized. Iraq was secure in some sense, before the war. The countries at the bottom billion are not- they seem to be zones where there is little to hope for when people are threatened left and right by robbers and by paramilitary organizations with no interest in a stable government.

Appadurai: Fear of Small Numbers
I liked how Appadurai constructed his argument with the idea of minority, in the context of representative democracy, with its positive political intonations, and the idea of a "substantive minority" as a group that could be politically destabilized or marginalized because of their small, vulnerable status as citizens or residents that might have some kind of sub-citizen or lower social status.

The targeted killings of distinct populations is something I never considered as a mass, that is, cross-country or cross-cultural, phenomenon. Appadurai puts these killings into a framework that is global, a phenomenon of large-scale minority elimination. Although there's something tricky about generalizing these murders and crimes across the contexts of various countries, perhaps Appadurai is right in stating that there are certain tactics targeting minorities (use of media, for example, as in the Iraqi beheadings) that are cross-cultural and globally penetrating. He argues that these tactics have been appropriated to create a fear of the minority, a fear of political instability in a world that is unstable in too many ways to enumerate.

Minority takes on a larger meaning in our world, as Appadurai mentions, when we consider the migrations of various ethnic populations now far-flung on the globe. In comparison to several hundred years ago or thousands of years ago, populations still migrated, but the total global population was much much smaller. Minorities have increased in number over the centuries and millenia- both in terms of how many different minorities have been created (as artificial political entities, in the opinion of Appadurai), and also in terms of quantity, if we examined a single "minority" population.

Global Population Stats from World Bank via Google

The stove article in the New Yorker:
I had to look up a photo of the stove, as I often do when reading descriptive texts about objects or appliances that I know nothing about. The project to create an inexpensive, useful and safe stove is indeed an important one that should be financially supported and publicized more, at least in mainstream media.The Buckminster Fuller Institute is one example of an organization that disburses financial awards to projects that are designed with sustainable processes and/or materials, and have potential global impact. Other projects that are inspiring to me in this way are ones where researchers are developing building materials that fit the needs of a particular climate or region, with sustainable, locally produced and/or easily transportable materials.

Finally, a word on the word "sustainable development" - are these terms mutually compatible? We hear sustainable development" being used all the time, and across these various readings and lectures the word "development" was used a lot, as was "sustainable", but not together. Is the project to engineer and distribute a better stove for countries that need them an example of sustainable development? I would say so.

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part I

2010-01-01T18:35:00.003-08:00

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."
-St. Augustine

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor… While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
-Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

From the early days of the printing press to our present day experiences with electronic media and Internet publishing, ideas of space and time are directly related to the way they have been expressed, preserved and circulated through physically reproducible artifacts, like printed books, as well as more recent "immaterial", electronic forms. In this essay, I would like to address some ideas relating to the spatial and temporal consequences of two communications technologies, namely, the printed book as it might have been circulated and received after the introduction of the first printing press; and the popular and educational adoption of the electronic web log, or "blog" in the latter half of twentieth-century. Writings by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Benedict Anderson offer two different perspectives on book reading, writing, and reception, while Manfred Steger’s definition of globalization and my own personal experience of maintaining a blog inform how I consider the latter type of media.

Before discussing the texts, however, I would like to define “technology” as a concept that is not limited to definitions of "hardware" or "equipment", or any kind of "material" construction devoid of human interaction; nor is technological development or understood as a linear process of scientific research, technical innovation and public adoption. Rather, I adopt Pinch & Bijker's idea of the social construction of technology, and their description of a sociology of technology as the "explanandum, not the explanans" for "the success of an artifact" (406), as a way of thinking about the book and the blog. Technology should be considered from an understanding of "a body of knowledge and a social system" and embedded in multiple historical processes and discourses (Layton 210). Lastly, in the spirit of Eisenstein’s conjectures, I would like to put forth some conjectures of mine regarding blogging as a social practice, and “doing history” with the blog as an intellectual one.

Benedict Anderson and Elizabeth Eisenstein present interpretations on the consequences of the printed book with somewhat overlapping historical and geographic foci. Eisenstein concerns much of her study with differentiation and divergence across the Western European populations who read, authored, published, governed or oversaw the process of print and distribution. As a historian, she attempts to overturn prior historical tendencies of generalizing the standardization and accessibility of print shortly after the invention of the printing press. Using innumerable and often contradictory examples, Eisenstein argues that the effects of print media did not necessarily impact the general population of Europe on an even, measurable scale. Many of the events and perceptual shifts she describes happened as “a large cluster of relatively simultaneous, interrelated changes” (2). In her research, she postulates that printed media led to the development of regional networks of printers and their various clients, and to diverse populations of the literate and casual book-reader throughout Europe (Eisenstein 5). Typographical fixity, image reproduction and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information allowed for scientific maps and texts to be distributed, cross-referenced, and standardized in format or content; at the same time, new hybrids of texts from old and new books came into existence (Eisenstein 8). New kinds of workers, such as compositors, were needed to meet the demand for printed works, and new categories of readers and writers, such as the writer-aristocrat, were also becoming apparent in the “age of incunabala”. Many of the groups of people involved in the creation and dissemination of texts, such as printers, scholars and priests, experienced dimensions and consequences of print media that were not applicable to book-reading populations. Literature intended for very specific audiences, such as texts on childrearing and etiquette, law, and esoteric religion and philosophy, was produced at much higher quantity than before (Eisenstein 40).

In comparison to Eisenstein’s examination of the variances, subgroups and networks of readers, writers, publishers, and other populations involved in the supply and demand of printed texts, Anderson offers up a novel interpretation of the printed book and the beginnings of print capitalism as agents of burgeoning national consciousness. The narrative world of books and what he calls “print-language” is presented as a linguistic innovation and a psychological paradigm for populations to imagine themselves as part of the emerging community of the nation. As Anderson states, “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed in their secular, particular invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44). Print-language preserved in a portable, visual and somewhat unchanging form, and distribution of books to a reading public (however segmented in occupation or socioeconomic strata), created fields of commonality and shared identity. New forms of narrative shifted temporal perception from ideas of omniscience and “simultaneity-along-time” in the medieval period to “empty, homogeneous time…measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 24).

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part II

2010-01-01T18:35:00.001-08:00

To read the first part of this essay see the previous entry entitled Part I

Another formulation relating space, time and communications technologies might be: how have the printed book or the electronic blog changed our notion of travel and accessibility to other cultures and ideas? In my blog for class, I write about how electronic communications technologies allow for an increased awareness of both location and dislocation because of their capacity for increased connectivity to physically distant and unknown people:
Our subjectivities and ideas of relating to one another have grown paradoxically larger and smaller. We may know more about our online friend in Southeast Asia who we have never met than we do our local politicians or neighbors. Or else we might conceive of global community as something exclusive to a certain group of people (by this I mean the Muslim concept of “umma” in the Steger reading. Or we might never leave Manhattan but spend all day trading stocks on the international market via the Internet.

Before making any generalizations about electronic media, however, it is important to emphasize that much of the world’s population who do not have access to computers, let alone the Internet and browser capability. Additionally, many people are still illiterate and cannot make use of these new forms of communication that still require reading and writing skills. Any study of the consequences of blogging and the socio-historical aspects of interactive communications technologies should bear these contexts in mind.

The awareness, perception, or mentalité, depending on which historical or phenomenological framework I am choose to use, relates to temporality, the Internet, World Wide Web and acceleration of information and material transactions: we can access real-time information on weather, news, blog entries and commentary all over the world. The convergence of communications platforms such as mobile phones, GPS satellite data, databases and networked computers allow for synchronous communication with people next to us or in remote areas, akin to Anderson’s imagined community of the nation, that we will probably never meet. The nation, however, is not the entity that is used to describe the space of these events – instead the metaphors we see and hear are ones associated with the “world” or global entities, such as the “World Wide Web” or to use an earlier term that we have encountered in class, Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” in the electronic age. Some of the geospatial visualizations and technologies available to us as business or educational tools, or voyeuristic opportunities, are both local (Google Street Maps/View) and global (Google Earth/remote sensing satellite images).

Using a combination of technologies such as the Web, the personal computer, mobile phone, and blogging platforms, we can read, write, and edit while moving from one place to another, and see feedback from our posts, if our blogs are popular, and respond within moments. We are able to communicate with these technologies in a way that decontextualizes our physical location, if we choose to remain anonymous. Alternately, we reveal our location and ideas, intentionally or unintentionally, to people using local idioms and references. When we publish our blogs, we anticipate our main audience to be speakers of our language; however, how are we to know that our readership is not limited to our friends and family or our local networks? We may not know this unless we choose to publicize our blogs (or have others do so to our knowledge or ignorance), tag entries appropriately, and track the demographics of our readership. One can argue convincingly that the exchange global goods, services and ideas is more readily available to people with portable purchasing, publishing, authoring and searching technologies than to prior readers and writers of the printed book or newspaper. Manfred Steger describes the sense of compressed and elongated notions of space and time that has characterized periods of world history in his definition of globalization:

“a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality...movement towards greater interdependence and integration..an uneven process...with four qualities or characteristics:
1) the creation of new, and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that cut across traditional political, economic, cultural and geographical boundaries
2) the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities and interdependencies
3) the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges & and activities
4) globalization processes do not occur merely on an objective, material level but also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness.”

Part of me wants to avert generalizing the experience of using high-speed communications technology, since there are so many issues of financial and geographical resources and timing that make communication possible on the networks that we use; however, the experience of using these technologies and learning from them is real for many of us at Teachers College, as evidenced by the computer-based demands of this particular class and the kinds of feedback and exploration afforded by our course wiki and individual blogs. Blogging, like book-writing and reading, is becoming a normalized practice in the everyday life of people who have access to these technologies and use them for information, entertainment, education, or therapy. Recent statistics from a Pew Research Center survey report that 33% of Internet users read weblogs and over 12% of Internet users maintain a blog (Smith, “New numbers for blogging and blog readership”). Maintaining a blog or wiki to elaborate one’s ideas with colleagues, students, or members of the public has become, in many parts of the country, an important part of collaborative academic work and to some extent, normalized in our day-to-day life.

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part III

2009-12-16T11:09:00.001-08:00

Please see the previous two entries for Parts I & II.

Perhaps one way to think about communications media and its attenuating psychological, temporal and geographical flexibility is how we manage our communication technology. Our blogs are quite flexible: we can continuously add new posts, delete previous posts, or change the overall design and categorization of posts. We have also discovered that organizational methods, like time-stamping blog entries and tagging articles for improved searching, helps us to create a system for tracking our writing and to aid us in our reading. Our systems are a means of preventing cognitive overload given the amount of textual and visual information we create or consume. They can also help publicize our work and interests to others. For example, we may choose to display where we live or work online so that those near or far can contact us for information or connect to our resources. These methods allow us to make sense of our shared reading and writing habits.

There are many more questions that emerge from examining my blog and the readings of this semester relating to historiography and methodology: firstly, how has the discipline of history and how have historical methods changed with technologies like blogs, the Internet, hypertext, and other documents and resources on the World Wide Web? What metaphors are we using to describe these phenomena (I mentioned two earlier, “global village” and “world.”) Are we becoming our own historians and archivists by documenting our lives with rapidly accumulating texts, images, and sounds? How do we study history when our primary documents are dynamic and interactive, as in the case of blogs and wikis? Do we read the “edits” page of Wikipedia entries as a document of history made transparent because we can see who corrected what entry and when? How do we consider the history of communication if our documents of study become increasingly disorderly, editable, and authorship is anonymous or questionable? How do we ascribe credibility to continuously changing texts? What is popular may be judged so based upon the opinions of an uninformed or uncritical mass, as we have learned from Jarod Lanier. Will we rely increasingly on algorithms, or on the online feedback of groups or individuals, to determine the importance of content? How do historians measure the importance of various events when so many experiences are documented and in so many ways? How does the scope of historical research change with hyperlinking, or when researching blogs that are not only singular entities, but connected to other blogs? How do we think about texts and sources that are dynamically populated with commentary, content and images authored by people all over the globe? In some ways some of these questions are distantly related to earlier problems of anonymity and authorship in ancient documents; however, what was previously rendered anonymous in the non-print world, may be rendered anonymous now on a much larger scale.

The two epithets at the beginning of this essay were selected because they linked now-clichéd metaphors relating books to physical worlds, and electronic books and texts to instantaneous accessibility to knowledge. Current communications technologies complicate how we examine knowledge and information because our objects of study are no longer easily bounded by physical spaces or timescales associated with printing press distribution or other forms of media that are less “instantaneous”. One word I have heard repeatedly throughout this semester in various classes is the word “multimodal.” What does this word mean in the context of the blog and print books? What does it mean to live in a world where communications technologies allow for expression in a multimodal way, with opportunities for us to access information and content in many different places and times? Although we can incorporate tracking programs into our blogs to understand how many people visit them and for how long, we cannot predict their social relevance, how they be recontextualized by others and by ourselves, or even how they will even look or sound in several years.

I have ended this essay with far more questions than answers for how we understand our relationship to history, time and place, reflecting the thought process of my past blog entries. These questions might serve as entryways for studying how we integrate technologies into our everyday lives, how we might teach or learn from them, and how we might make distinctions in their use and reception. It is a confusing and exciting time to be a historian, journalist, teacher, student, diarist, hobbyist, knowledge worker, pundit, self-described expert- whatever you want to call the individuals or groups of people who use and contribute to the discourses afforded by blogging or any other form of computer-mediated communciation. Will our blogs serve as historical documents and testimonies of our lives in the beginning of the twenty-first century, just as paper-bound journals, printed newspaper and written ephemera served to assist in the research of historians like Elizabeth Eisenstein or others we have read (or even to assist ourselves in research, as academics and educators)? Just as the Annales historians that Professor McClintock spoke of earlier this semester brought attention to the human life outside of the explicitly political sphere, so there are many opportunities today to study the microhistories of people as they document their lives and thoughts in websites, wikis and blogs.

Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Brin, Sergey. “Google Books Settlement Agreement.” Web. 12 Dec. 2009.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report.” The Journal of Modern History 40 (1) Mar. 1968: 1-56. JSTOR. Web. 11 Mar. 2009.
Layton, E. “Conditions of Technological Development.” Science, Technology and
Society. London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977. Print.
Pinch, Trevor J. & Bijker, Wiebe E. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or
How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit
Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14, 1984: 388 - 441. JSTOR. Web.
10 Feb. 2009.
Smith, Aaron. “New numbers for blogging and blog readership.” Pew Research Center’s
Internet & American Life Project. 22 Jul. 2008. Web. 14 Dec. 2009.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2008/July/New-numbers-for- blogging-and-blog-readership.aspx
St. Augustine, City of God, New York: The Modern Library, 1994. Print.
Steger, Manfred. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003. Print.

McLuhan & some thoughts on TV

2009-12-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

The semester is getting crazy and my wrist is killing me from all this typing. Is my laptop an extension of my wrist/brain/arm/eyes... to use McLuhan's idea of media as extensions of the senses...or is it the other way around? here a few notes:

***medium is the message/media are an extension of the senses
I find it hard to believe that people used to write everything on paper, including novels and philosophical texts that in printed book form are hundreds of pages long. The Constitution was of course famously drafted by hand. The famous Domesday book in England is thousands of pages long, as were Bibles copied by monks. Didn't the wrists of drafters of these documents hurt too after awhile?

I can appreciate McLuhan for this concept of "the medium is the message", and also for taking analytic emphasis away from the content of media towards an understanding media as any kind of technology that extends our senses, thereby changing our consciousness in some way. Media were criticized back then as they are now for disseminating controversial content. How do they impact our learning and understanding by triggering or enhancing certain cognitive functions? In Understanding Media, McLuhan conjectures that forms of media allow fuller engagement with humans, as he believes in the case of television and the media of our electric/electronic age. How true is this? He makes the comparison that while print individualized and privileged the sense of vision, television brought about more sensory awareness and viewer participation, as well as greater geographic and cultural awareness. I am left wondering what is it about television's characteristics that contribute to emergent human attitudes and perception vis-a-vis print?

I used to hate television, but I love it now- I love the stories and the short time commitment I have to an episode. I don't think that I subscribe wholesale to "the medium is the message", but I certainly think that types of media certainly contribute to the making and shaping of a message. Maybe during McLuhan's time, television did bring more "reality" into the household. In the fifties, when Understanding Media was written, writers, actors, producers, camerapersons, light, sound and makeup artists crystallized their skills into the format that we most associate with television: 1-hr episodes with intermittent advertising. Sitcoms from that time period are less interesting to me in some ways that other kinds of shows, like ones that taught cooking, or game shows where people could win big. The advent of television was the advent of a new babysitter and ersatz parent: kids could be entertained by moving sound and image in a safe environment, at home, and maybe even learn a little in the process of viewing. People watched events like the moon landing or sports events take place in a way that photos just did not communicate- in a breathless, "I am watching this happen live" kind of way. Advertisements were much much longer back then and generalized to a wide audience of viewers, perhaps to a much different effect than than they do now, in small, customized bits and pieces, on the tops of our screens or embedded into the videos we watch online.

***global village/tribes
Television seems like one way to utopia/peace as McLuhan describes it, the whole global village metaphor and all. I don't like his hot/cold media spectrum. Also I cringed a lot when I read all of McLuhan's generalizations about literate and preliterate humans and their dispositions to certain kinds of thinking..what did he, a celebrity academic, know about the functions of tribal society anyways? Does he realize that tribal society is not necessarily harmonious...but full of conflict and tension and emotional or political manipulation like any kind of human organization?

The Control Revolution

2009-12-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

"Weber included among defining characteristics of bureaucracy several important aspects of any control system: impersonal orientation of structure to the information that it processes, usually identified as "cases," with a predetermined formal set of rules governing all decisions and responses. Any tendency to humanize this bureaucratic machinery, Weber argued, would be minimized through clear-cut division of labor and definition of responsibilities, hierarchical authority, and specialized decision and communication functions."

-- From The Control Revolution, James Beniger, p. 15

Beniger's description of Weber's definition of bureaucracy made me laugh and reminded me of the experience I had just gone through prior to reading this introduction. I had recently experienced some problems with the database on my website, and I went through my hosting company multiple times to ask some questions. Each time, I spoke to a human who recited a script and followed various protocols in order to assist me. I was put on hold multiple times before I finally reached the right person in the right department and was handed various case numbers and that sort of thing. All in all, I was happy to speak with a person rather than a computerized/automated system that responded to vocal cues, numbers and specific words- experiencing a robot voice rather than a human person in my experience is incredibly frustrating when one is faced with any kind of technical or logistical problem. In a way, the experience was as efficient as I could possibly imagine, yet in another it was incredibly redundant as I was forced to repeatedly state my name, recite pieces of various contact information, and answer my "secret question" to people in each department.

On a more theoretical note, Beniger in The Control Revolution has me wondering in his text where the role of nation-building, the emergence of the nation, the consequences of colonialism/empire, and mechanized/modern warfare fit into his theory of a 19th-century crisis of control and the subsequent restoration of economic and communicative order, a macro-change in social, production, distribution, and information processing relations that he calls the Control Revolution? (p. 26.) Where do these political, economic and social events or shifts fall? Are they too obvious in terms of their societal and economic influence? I think the answer to that might be yes, but at the same time his introduction seems a bit anemic to me when these issues are not at all addressed, even by way of a disclaimer from him.

I've also been thinking about what we were asked in class: what characteristics or conditions of the Industrial Revolution led to the growing need for rapid, inexpensive and widespread communications technologies, developing forms of organizational management, information processing capacities and information management sciences? Was it new forms of transportation that changed our economic system and made it more efficient or even possible to buy and sell at a distance? Was it a need to expand existing governments by demonstrating economic and social influence wherever possible? I don't know how to answer these question in a few sentences, truly, but I feel like there is something missing in Beniger if he does not include the role of national infrastructures as critical to making these changes. I wonder how many of these material and societal changes via technology came from top-down or bottom-up, from private or governmentally funded institutions or organizations, in terms of their research & development, implementation, and publicization of the usefulness and appeal.

My other question is: where are the humans in Beniger's analysis? In all of this I am wondering about human agency in the world of control, if we are more than just creators and then parts of these systems he speaks of. The world appears awfully reductionist in some way if everything is thought of in terms of control, or lack of it. For some reason I got the impression that Beninger describes all humans as roughly the same, as part of the managerial/economic/productive/telecom/industrial order of things, or else he doesn't describe us at all (those who don't fit into the picture or who are left behind the control system, or who are exploited by it.)

Carey, the Telegraph, digital time and the voice of energy

2009-11-18T07:58:00.001-08:00

I loved this reading, because I think that Carey points out an important historical, social and economic moment that should be common knowledge, or at least taught more in schools, and that is is how our current system of time zones and coordinated timing of trains (and the stock market thereafter, most likely) came into being. According to our reading today is the anniversary of the first time people in the USA conceptualized the nation continentally in four time zones by matching major city clocks across these zones. I like how Carey writes about the telegraph as having such far reaching consequences in narrative style and human speech, in changing human thought to understand the possibility of instantaneous communication over a long distance. It probably isn't a coincidence either that when I type in "telegraph" into Google's search engine, the first item that appears in my browser window is a link to the UK newspaper, the Telegraph.

My father has worked for decades in the telecom industry and he spent his early career as an electrical engineer at Bell Labs before deregulation. I never tire of telling people how proud I am of his work- he was involved in the research and development of early frequency control devices, oscillators made first of quartz and later silicon, that control digital devices by stabilizing their electrical signals. In essence they act as clocks for digital devices, controlling the stream of 1s and 0s in our iPhones and computers, amongst other more sophisticated electronic devices and machines. I am (obviously) too young to remember the telegraph but I do remember early telephones developed by AT&T for consumer use that enabled people to see the person they were speaking to on a small screen above the keypad. I thought these machines were revelatory at age 7, and so did the people at the AT&T convention we attended, but consumers never wanted to buy $1000 telephones even if they could see their friends and distant relatives on them. Perhaps the 'transaction costs' were too high. Now, we have virtual teleconferencing capabilities and telepresence technologies that make use of the Internet, though the costs of these media is still prohibitive to some extent to the mass market (at least in the latter technology.)

I'm going to end this post by citing the lyrics to The Voice of Energy, a lesser known song/speech through vocoder by one of my favorite music groups, Kraftwerk. I have always been a fan of their playful yet obsessive engagement with technology, electricity, electronics, and communication. Carey says this, tangentially, and I agree- changes to synchronous/instantaneous communication technology depended largely on controlled manipulation of electricity, which dates back to the late 19th century- quite recent! Back to Kraftwerk, though- I think that their continued use of metaphors linking humans to machines is appropriate to our discussion here and also to Carey's notion of discourses of electricity and religious ideology:

Kraftwerk  - The Voice Of Energy
 Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie
 Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator 
Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft 
Und ermoegliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild 
Durch den Aether auszusenden und zu empfangen
 Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich 
Deshalb huetet mich gut  Mich, den Genius der Energie
***
 This is the Voice of Energy
 I am a giant electrical generator 
I supply you with light and power 
And I enable you to receive Speech, Music and Image through the Ether
 I am your servant and lord at the same time 
Therefore guard me well
 Me, the genius of Energy

Imagined Communities

2009-11-12T04:05:00.001-08:00

Benedict Anderson has me wondering how much of a "community" like the nation is in fact "imagined", that is, related to my presumption or belief that I have historical or social affinities with people whom I will never see. I find it hard to conceive of the "Nation" (the capital "N" is intentional"), a seemingly enormous and somewhat ambiguous entity, as a "community" in the first place, since the latter term carries with it connotations and associations of the local, of smaller, more focused boundaries and perhaps a different kind of social participation than the national, semi-abstracted scale of a representative democracy.

We see national symbolism around us, and systems of representation that reach into our personal and political identities. Even I choose not to call myself American for whatever reason, I can't escape the fact that identity by way of country of origin is linked to how other people perceive me and how I am recognized by my government (if I want to be legally recognized with attendant Constitutional rights.) Is national awareness a matter of social conditioning and construction like we said in class? Aren't nations a little too gigantic to be functional communities, if even imagined ones? Clearly Anderson is trying to do is change existing anthropological and sociological ideas of "community" from their roots in observed and rule-based structural analyses to something more psychological, attitudinal, and even technologically defined.

On another note, when I think about all of our discussions about technology, education, and life and literacy in the past versus the present, I always return to the same head-scratching paradoxes. We are living in a world where depending on the scope of our investigations of human patterns we can find elements (to name just a few) supporting the predominance of globalizing forces that reach beyond traditional "imaginings" of the nation, like the force of stock market, trading, and extensive trans-national currency systems and forms of governance/justice. On the other hand we are right to believe that the governments of nations instrumentalize the idea of the "nation" as imagined community to shape themselves and wield sovereignty over other nations or disputed territories.

It's so difficult to think about the importance of nationalism without thinking about globalization (and capitalism and colonialism) and all of these ideas turn into one giant historical game of Chicken and Egg, at worst. I do like how we are discussing these ideas from the lens of communication and media, and the entryway of print and language as central to the process of nation-building, identity politics, and popular culture. I also think our discussion about generational attitudes towards media is worth returning to for the last part of this blog: There is definitely a push and pull of different generations, from inside the family, to the makeup of institutions like schools and government throughout the world, to negotiate the influence of popular culture through music, television shows, movies, video games, and the technologies that transmit or mediate these elements. Do these products represent their home nations (or not), and how critical are they to establishing an imaginary collectivity and sense of "community" in their dynamics of language, space and time along the lines of what Anderson sees in print media? I see a strong demographic and ideological segmentation in the "imagined-ness" of the nation, and that even within one nation different groups will embrace or reject cultural products as representative of their nation. And because people have migrated and settled all over the world at this point, it makes analysis even more difficult. Think of the rejection of "Slumdog Millionaire" by many Indians all over the world and also in India- it was passed off by many for portraying India in a negative light, as an impoverished nation and full of the standard cliches pertaining to countries with regions and people in different stages of development. Yet what do the statistics of recent urban Indian poverty show? If the film was directed by an Indian person would it have been portrayed and received differently internationally, as "authentic"? Who can criticize national identity- the insider or the outsider? How do we imagine our nationality now in a world that is both nationalist and post-national, depending on who you ask and where you are and what angles you are comparing? Just some thoughts.

Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

2009-11-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?

Victor Hugo & Frances Yates

2009-10-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

In The One Will Kill the Other, Hugo links the the death of the symbolic power of buildings and monuments with the invention of printing and the mass circulation of books. He organizes his argument around what he imagines edifices and monuments to represent and even embody, namely, the rise of certain theocratic civilizations and the unity of ideas and people. With the rise of printing, however, comes the twilight of architectural innovation and the proliferation of endless derivatives of earlier forms of building. Conversely, in the world of human ideas, the printing of books allows for a multiplicity of opinion: even the possibility of dissent and revolution.

I found it curiously ironic that Hugo uses a/the book as a metaphor for both architecture and printing. He calls one the "Bible of stone" and the other, the Bible of paper" (180). That analogy reminds me of former ideas of the indisputability of truth in writing, which like architecture, was considered a sacred practice (think of the Mosaic tablets and rituals of the Freemasons.) Of course I can't speak of the emergence of the printing press without speaking about current ideas of computer and information technology, desktop publishing, and the Internet representing, for some, the death of the text as a fixed, non-editable "whole." I don't agree with ideas that books are dead, necessarily, or that they existed as some pure form of knowledge- the writing, editing and publishing of books have always been a messy affair, in terms of problems of translation, access, and distribution.

Yates credits the anonymous author of the Latin text, Ad Herennium, with first describing the historical technique of memorizing sequences of images and ideas in accordance with the mental placement of these ideas on selective locations. This technique was instrumental to orators and scholars who 'mentalized' knowledge with great effort, since they did not have the ways and means of conveniently writing their ideas down and bringing them around. People practiced generating ideas, remembering their sequence, and finally delivering their speeches convincingly; in some ways, they made their minds a kind of portable locus of patterns of ideas and images that could be easily expressed in speech. Yates even mentions how the art of memory had significant ethical value, and how Thomas Aquinas attributed the virtue of prudence to artificial memory.

The chapter reminds me of how much current literature in education stresses conceptual thinking over memorization of small details (or curriculum based entirely on memorization without understanding.) Memorization of ideas and words is still desired in many areas of study, including anatomy or other biological sciences, as well as in language acquisition. Also, memorization practices and techniques are still critical today to the performing arts (theater, music and film), though the techniques for music and theatre are more related to kinaesthetic and syntheaesthetic memory- bodily repetition- than merely mental imaginings to trigger a pattern of thought.

The Aeneid

2009-10-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Why did we read this text? I am failing to understand how the Aeneid fits in the broader scope of our course. Were we reading it as a contrasting text to the performed Homeric epic, and as Professor McClintock was saying in class, were we trying to consider it as a written poem (that would have been recited from time to time?) In what context did the Romans read the Aeneid? Did they read it in schools and have to memorize it? Were we reading it as a precursor to Francis Yates and trying to understand what poetic devices did for the memory and construction of abstract ideas? I want to avoid the banal answer of saying, yes, we read it because it's an integral part of liberal arts education. I found it rather difficult to extrapolate a sense of education based upon the several books we read. Were we speaking of education during Virgil's time or our own lifetime? Maybe our discussion questions were a little too open-ended.

I can read the text in the sense that I can appreciate it on its literary and historic merits; certainly, Virgil made an enormous contribution to poetic structure, the world of narrative ideas, our knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology, and also to Greek and Roman arts, ethics and military history. There are so many ways of approaching the Aeneid, yet for some reason I could neither engage with this text in the context of this class, nor in the context of my life! Maybe my attitude towards understanding this text speaks to how distanced I feel from war, even though we are currently still fighting one and "wars", whether real or rhetorically imposed, are going on all the time around us: the war on drugs, shadow wars, etc. It's interesting to think that wars in ancient Rome and pre-Roman times were not fought for an idea of "democratic freedom" but rather fought as a predestined activity fulfilling a desire for imperial expansion.

In my reading, I inclined to believe that Greco-Roman warriors thought that one good reason to conquer people was to enlighten them with "peace" and bring them out of psychological and philosophical darkness (the Allegory of the Cave comes to mind.) Virgil describes a Roman encounter with far-flung cultures at the end of Book VIII, and although the context is celebration, I find it rather depressing, and the procession described as somewhat funereal. Roman conquest spelt the end of some civilizations.

"But entering
the walls of Rome in triple triumph, Caesar
was dedicating his immortal gift
to the Italian gods: three hundred shrines
throughout the city. And the streets reechoed
with gladness, games, applause; in all the temples
were bands of matrons, and in all were altars;
and there, before these altars, slaughtered steer
were scattered on the ground. Caesar himself
is seated at bright Phoebus' snow-white porch,
and he reviews the spoils of nations and
he fastens them upon the proud doorposts.
The conquered nations march in long procession,
as varied in their armor and their dress
as in their languages. Here Mulciber
had modeled Nomad tribes and the Africans,
loose-robed; the Carians; the Leleges,
Geloni armed with arrows. And he showed
Euphrates, moving now with humbler waves;
the most remote of men, the Morini;
the Rhine with double horns, the untamed Dahae;
and river that resents its bridge, the Araxes."
(929-950)

Latour & Science/science

2009-10-14T10:59:00.000-07:00

In "Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature," Latour argues that proponents of "political ecology" are correct in practice and not in theory when they take on sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems related to the environment. He has hope that they will drop their allegiance to a totalizing "nature" and the desire to instrumentalize science in service of political ideology.

Latour states that supporters of "political ecology" should not rationalize their actions according to a holistic idea of nature (and some even thinking of "nature" as something devoid from humans, or separate from humans), and take on a fragmented, more historically materialist perspective. "Nature" - and by nature I take him to mean the biological and physical world, not the "essence" of something, as per a more philosophical definition - is rooted in social relations and actions. He says, "Nature is not in question in ecology: on the contrary, ecology dissolves nature's contours and redistributes its agents." (21) Agents in this case may be non-human (Latour is one of the founders of ANT (Actor-Network Theory) and things like "rules, apparatuses, consumers, institutions, mores, calves, cows, pigs, broods"-- are all part of the problem. And the problems of nature and the political are interrelated and messy. The relationship is unstable, non-linear. He compares how we might now consider objects in nature as "risky matters-of-concern" that coexist with old scientific ideas, or objects that are constructed as "matters-of-fact".

What does this say about the human desire for scientific progress? Are our scientific endeavors still an attempt to take this idea of "nature" and harness it for our own? This seems rather 19th century, yes? What about the current desire to restore some sort of equilibrium? Was there never any kind of equilibrium to begin with? Is Latour speaking to the idea that humans can never agree on anything, including nature, and that my idea of "the environment" might completely different from someone else's, and perhaps both ideas are equally valid and worth investigating?

Education, Tradition, Argh

2009-10-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

Reading Plato & Havelock was a reflective experience for me. I felt inspired to Google the Latin motto of Columbia University and found that Columbia's motto was "In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen", translated as "In Thy light shall we see light". Although this motto comes from the book of Psalms in the Judeo-Christian Bible, perhaps Plato's Allegory of the Cave is useful to think about as well. From Plato onwards we have seen this metaphor of education as light, as a beacon, etc. But for whom, and how do we educate? These questions were as urgent then as they are now. Not everyone then could be educated; people had to work. Someone had to bury the dead and bake bread and deal with a primitive sewer system. People had their places and class distinctions. They fought in the military and some learned how to be priests. They did a million things, with and without institutional or formal "education" as we might describe it. Mandatory education is a modern invention, and mandatory education for young people of even more recent origin.

Plato says that those in the light must not stay in the light. Yet- he insists in a Socratic idea of knowledge as the ultimate abstraction. The progression of cultivating philosopher-kings is such: they have to first learn about abstractions like arithmetic, and music, and then they will learn how to love knowledge, and then they can be socialized with other types of people in order to rule them, with love of knowledge and (to be extrapolated from this) some kind of commutative love for people. They can't learn poetry- because that would be the equivalent of us contemporary people learning in the classroom from telenovellas or other kinds of televised entertainment. If I continue with this analogy from a Platonic/Havelock perspective, I might argue that although there are history and science and other kinds of channels teaching us the ways of the world, we are ultimately not learning to think for ourselves if we engage in this medium or allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with the totalizing reality of these communicative instruments. This sounds familiar. We are not cognizant of what is virtue when we watch television or when we listen to Homeric epics, because when we do either one of those things, we are presented with a relativist portrait of virtue that we then imitate. (What is virtue, by the way?) Is that a good analogy? Hm. Are we trapped in cave-television where (true) knowledge evades us?

On the side of Butler Library the names of the illustrious dead Greek philosophers and poets are inscribed: HOMER< CICERO< ETC. (or maybe it is HOMER > CICERO >ARISTOTLE etc) As part of the Core Curriculum I had to read the works of these men, with the occasional woman and person of color added to our syllabus.

What are we preparing ourselves to do with education? Do academics stay in the light a little too long? Are we simply guilty of the same kind of oral-psychological mimesis as Homer when we read these "canons of Western literature/philosophy and thought"? Obviously I am overstating these issues; clearly, many of our legal, political and educational institutions have emerged from these principles and from many conflicting attempts to answer these questions. What about learning or education outside of the institution? Is there room in Plato's philosophy or Havelock's analysis of it for the autodidact? Why must learning be about virtue? Where do different systems of learning play a part in our cognitive and historical development? Isn't learning, for one thing, about self-discovery and possessing a greater appreciation for things like technological inventions or the human body or the rigor of Homeric poetry (and potentially trying to add to these worlds ourselves)? What of learning and practical applications of it, like helping sick people get better? Why do some of us continue, as Plato/Socrates did, to fetishize learning as something elite or conceive of it as something that requires an almost militaristic training? Learning and education: learning > education or learning < education. Please tell me.

Philosophy in the Age of Distraction

2009-09-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

I am struggling to define some relationships between Homer, Heraclitus and Protagoras based upon my limited knowledge of Greek poetry and philosophy. I suppose one might use the lengthy quality of Homeric epic poetry versus the short aphorisms of the latter two philosophers as a basis of comparison. I have also considered Heraclitus and Protagoras as thinkers working within different frameworks of "philosophy" as we might define the term today. Philosophy is in my opinion a formalistic inquiry into how the world exists and how reality is defined. This includes how humans might conduct themselves and also how they might construct a system of justice or define political life. We can see these lines of inquiry emerging in Protagoras and Heraclitis. As these kinds of philosophical considerations are embedded in Homer's oral epic poetry I feel that they are less systematically described.

Additionally, philosophizing in the time of the Presocratics appears to be open to debate, and debate does not seem to be part of the manner by which Homer constructs his narrative. Although the characters within the Iliad may debate each other, Homer's epic was not recited nor performed to elicit debate; in other words, I gather that Homer was not thinking about "philosophy as rhetoric" per se in his performances. He was not concerned with crafting an art of speech to defend one's rights and property like Protagoras who, according to Aristotle, even justified his right to take money to help people "better" themselves in the art of rhetoric.

Snell argues that the "Homer conceived of the thing which we call intellect in a different manner, and that in a sense the intellect existed for him, though not qua intellect." I am not quite sure what Snell means by intellect. Does Snell mean the construction of human subjectivity when he uses the term "intellect"? Another Snell question might be important here: "What did the Greeks at any given time know about themselves, and what did they not yet know?" Does Snell mean "self-consciousness", which could mean anything from having consciousness about one's world to theorizing about it? Aristotle writes about (and this is taken from a fragment in the Protagoras reading) how Protagoras struggled with geometry and mathematics as a legitimate subject of inquiry ("As Protagoras says of mathematics, the subject-matter is unknowable, and the terminology distasteful.") I cite this as an example of something that some "Greeks" did not yet know, or at least something that they could not agree on as an object of inquiry.

Finally, a comment on methodology: I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to construct a coherent philosophy of thinkers like Heraclitus and Protagoras from fragments of mostly secondhand sources.

Epic poetry

2009-09-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a long time since I last read Homer, and this past week I had to mentally adjust to the non-direct, circular quality of the Iliad. I had to refamiliarize myself with verbal exchange that consisted of lengthy speeches issued from one character to the other. Because the characters do not respond to each other succinctly, one gets the feeling that they are lecturing to an invisible audience.

In short, I had to get used to reading epic poetry, which is an entirely different experience than one would have hearing it episodically and with variations of performance, as I would imagine to be the case of Homeric audiences. Havelock says, "Epic had been par excellence the vehicle of the preserved word through the Dark Age." (47) This idea of the "preserved word" is worthy of attention here, since it seems almost paradoxical to present a notion of "preserved word" vis-a-vis the stories in the Iliad. If Greek stories of gods and humans, warfare and ritual were passed orally (assuming this is preliterate Greece), they probably did not exist in the sense of "preserved", as a 1-1 copy of one story to the next, but as variations of each other. They were imitations, and one might consider Havelock's analysis of Plato, and the latter's problems with Homer, in light of this chain of imitation, of poor imitations.

This leads me to one of main question (posed by Havelock) in this week's reading: what exactly is Plato's problem with mimesis? According to the classicist, Plato applies the term to a variety of Homeric contexts. Is Plato's problem with mimesis a question of the act itself, coming from the poet, or mimesis in the context of epic poetry? I am inclined to think that Plato's issue with imitation lies in the genre, and most crucially, in the experience, of listening to and absorbing the messages of epic poetry over and over again. In Plato, this sort of "brainwashing" of the listeners and audiences of epic poetry is antithetical to the engagement of Socratic dialogue, and as a form of paideia, only a weak copy (as Dan mentioned) of existing, deeper bodies of knowledge. I.e., if you want to learn about making a boat, don't ask Homer to give you a lecture, ask the boatmaker or sailor.

Globalization just goes on and on

2009-09-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

In Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, Steger insightfully addresses both the time- and space-based aspects of globalization. I feel that very often the temporal, longitudinal dimension of globalization processes is ignored and that experts, academics and historians often wish to set their narratives or theories of globalization resolutely in the present. Steger positions himself as someone who wishes to flesh out these processes and move beyond popular ideas linking the interconnectedness of the world to technological innovation, industrialization and to the capitalist economic model (i.e., Thomas Friedman, who needs to wake up to intensified socioeconomic inequality across his "flat" globe.) I especially like how Steger includes one quality of globalization processes as not only occurring "on an objective, material level but also [involving] the subjective plane of human consciousness."

Globalization is not a singular thing or one narrative- it is a set of processes that are constantly changing and evolving towards this notion of "globality" that Steger speaks of, a more interconnected world of people ideas objects and geographies. It is truly such a tricky concept to think about because one can present so many different threads of globalizing tendencies and manifest so many "ideologies of globality" at so many points in the world. I could be speaking about the impact or the flows of information, knowledge and people from my perspective, but someone from another part of the world might and most definitely has a different outlook on these flows of information, goods, people, ideas and on the moral questions of how these changes are taking place and whether it is even good that they are happening. Our subjectivities and ideas of relating to one another have grown paradoxically larger and smaller. We may know more about the our online friend in Southeast Asia who we have never met than we do our local politicians or neighbors. Or else we might conceive of global community as something exclusive to a certain group of people. Or we might never leave Manhattan but spend all day trading stocks on the international market via the Internet. It is this weird, flexible dimension of globalizing processes today that I find so fascinating.

In another class of mine, Social Aspects of Internet Technology, we discussed the use of metaphors in language, science, culture and technology, and how they assist us in creating mental pictures and mnemonic devices, and also in deepening our understanding of certain concepts. We have been doing that in our Coreseminar as well. I realized that reading Steger's definition of globalization fit almost perfectly with the dynamics of the Internet communication, which includes material connections and the interactions of human users. As we know the world of Internet communications is made of millions of flows and countless social, cultural, economic, political and ideological transactions occur every second. I would like to write out Steger's concept of globalization, as I find that the very language he uses illustrates this metaphor:

"The term globalization applies to a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality...movement towards greater interdependence and integration..an uneven process...
with four qualities or characteristics:

1) the creation of new, and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that cut across traditional political, economic, cultural and geographical boundaries

2) the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities and interdependencies

3) the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges & and activities

4) globalization processes do not occur merely on an objective, material level but also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness"

(Steger, 13-15)

The Internet metaphor fails, however, when we think about the historical modulations of globalization. A computerized global network with the kind of span and reach of Internet communication has only been in existence for the past several decades, whereas Steger speaks of the many kinds of global linkages, migrations, and technological developments that have transformed our relationships across geographical and temporal boundaries and brought them closer together. The Internet globalization metaphor only works in terms of thinking about immediate fluxes and flows of our world. It fails to show us where we are going or where we wish to go; it shows us process but can't show us details or directional changes- we would have to zoom in and analyze a piece of the overall picture.

Similarly to bring this rambling post back to Jared Lanier's point- we are growing more connected, perhaps, in terms of the amount of network cables and Internet connections that exist in comparison to decades ago, but are we truly interacting more in a meaningful way? Or are we simply all agreeing upon banal facts or stories, and burying important information and voices?

World order, the definition of epistolary, and permanent education as necessity!

2009-09-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Hi class,

I thought it would be a fun exercise to write this blog entry in letter form. I looked up the word "epistolary" (of or pertaining to letters, according to Oxford English Dictionary), which was used to describe the novel Emilia, one of our readings, and decided, hey, why not, since this post is unstructured, I'll make this an epistolary blog entry.

Firstly, regarding Deibert, I was intrigued by his elucidation of the study of transformations of world order; I have heard of international studies, certainly, but not world order studies. Do institutes in "World Order Studies" exist, and is this a new discipline? His project of examining several periods of technological development on a global order, and using medium theory interpreted through an ecological, holist lens, is certainly an ambitious one. I like his thinking about technology (material as well as cognitive/perceptual/symbolic aspects) and lived, dynamic culture vis-a-vis Darwinian ideas of change and "descent with modification". I too believe that ideas grow stronger or weaker in certain environments; that these environments are constantly changing, and that our responses and attractions to technology are located in a complex, very often unpredictable matrix that can extend from the (relatively) small, individualized scale (for example, my decision to buy an iphone or to stop texting friends, or to purchase a book online or teach an e-course) to phenomena with more global reaching developments (twitter getting nailed by a DOS attack.)

About Emilia: I found myself simultaneously agreeing with and getting frustrated with Rob's points. Unfortunately I think that many adults have to go to back out of necessity, because jobs in this day and age require retooling of existing skill sets, or the acquisition of entirely new skill sets. "Permanent education" is a necessity for many to improve their socioeconomic lot, and I think that attitude is in some ways more historicist and historically accurate than asserting or trying to convince policymakers and educators that everyone wants to learn because they have the time and money and desire to do so. I also think that it is important to offer a myriad of ways of learning, and not to oust one form (let us not throw away the textbooks entirely!) for another. At the same time I understand his point about not trying to reinvent the wheel- maybe what we should be doing instead is addressing the needs of this day and age.

What comes to my mind, personally speaking, is the need overall for a "media management" or information organization class, some workshop where students are taught the basics of organizing files and media assets, naming them properly, citing them...these are all things that I wish I had learned properly and are extremely useful in graduate school and professional life. What might come naturally to others came to me only after many years of stumbling around, reading informational texts here and there, and receiving training from a professional web developer. I was taught the absolute importance of organizing media files, and thereafter acquired my own way of organizing my desktop and files. This is, IMHO, an important skill set for students, teachers, media makers, editors, and producers, administrators, virtually anyone working with digital assets. One practice in media/information organization and blogs that I have learned over the years is to first write entries in a text editor, save them, and then paste them in the blog interface, after having lost material in previous years...yikes!)

I would like to close by saying that I am eager to respond to focused questions in the future. I find these open-ended responses a bit overwhelming, but that's just the kind of learner/student that I am! I like questions to respond to and discursive flexibility around that.

Hope you'll take the time to write back!

Best of luck in this new school year,

Sophie

Testing this blog

2009-09-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hello, world!