Calling for Five Minutes of Your Time

I just read a disturbing story on how libraries are being pressured away from cooperating with open source project: a concise post, written by Aaron Swartz over at Raw Thought. If you don't have the time to read the article, please, please, sign the petition.

Here's what I wrote as my message, feel free to crib, borrow, or challenge:

As a professor of classical rhetoric and new media production, I stress to my peers and students the important of open source projects. The progression of our society depends upon the free, uninhibited flow of information; digital technologies magic stems from their ability to foster cooperation and harness human interest, effort, and work.

We cannot allow any group to attempt to usurp and monopolize information. Centralizing control of library catalogues is itself a bad idea; to attempt to capitalize on such control treads on the criminal. The information collected in libraries represents the work of thousands over hundreds of years. It is not a resource to be strip-mined for benefit of a few.

Update: A few people asked for a quick summation, so here goes. There's a library database group, the OCLC, that started grassroots. Essentially, they run a master database that catalogues every book in the US. Back in the day, every library employed somebody to do this, but now almost every library relies on the database.

Well, the grassroots company has been purchased by for-profit industrialists, and they realize that they have a potential monopoly on their hands--without them, no library could run an electronic catalogue. They have grown into a power, and now they are demanding that any library that uses their system refuses to share catalogue info with any other group.

Embracing Error

I found Tim Barker's "Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent The Error and Interactive Media Art" on work/space. In Barker, I hear what Lanham would refer to as a strong defense for rhetoric: one that recognizes probability not as a lack of certainty but as the possibility of potential. Given my dissertation focuses on public appreciation of the integral role risk must play in our emerging communication networks (a sentiment echoed in Levinas' description of the subject frightfully aware of its contingent dependence on others), I particularly liked this passage:

Any system that seeks the actualisation of unforeseen potential is also a system that has the capacity to become errant. Rather than thinking of the error as something to fear or avoid, we can think of an error as something that brings with it the capacity for the new and the unforeseen (perhaps it is this link to the unforeseen that is precisely the reason that we fear the errant).

Barker connects these ideas to Deleuze, but I think we can also productively connect them to Levinas-Derrida in their opposition to the metaphysics of presence and certainty. Here's a follow-up:

If a system runs through its process without the potential for error it is essentially closed. It does not allow the potentiality of the emergent or the unforeseen. It is only through allowing the capacity for potential errors that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to become-other, and to hence initiate further unforeseen becomings in the virtual (Rodowick 201).

I'm learning to embrace the productive mess.

Shouldn't This Be Bigger News

Came across this story on artificial intelligence this morning. Let's put it alongside this:

I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about.

Cause, really, the thing is that four-year olds grow up so quickly.

Reputation as Ethos for the Responsible Netizen

I picked up the quizercise from Karl Stolley (who, I am pretty sure, just adapted Janice Lauer's "writing opportunity"): every Monday, before we begin discussing the week's readings, I ask students some kind of question that calls on them to connect the reading to the larger goals of the class. This week, I opened with a discussion of the importance of MLA citation (since I had caught a few students liberally borrowing material without proper citation). We had read from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs for class that day, and I asked them the following: focusing on a specific passage or idea from Smart Mobs, explain why an English teacher might discuss the importance of MLA citation before discussing Smart Mobs. Circular? You betcha! But I like giving them these kinds of meta-questions, just to see how well they are beginning to understand my underlying aspirations for the course.

Often, I write answers to my own quiz questions--though I give myself some liberties to stray off-topic (I give my students the same liberties, essentially they have ten minutes to prove to me that they have done the reading!). Here's what I wrote in response to my own question:

In Smart Mobs, author Howard Rheingold suggests that the most productive social networks develop "bottom-up" measures for establishing authority and filtering out free riders. He writes:

Self-monitoring is part of successful grassroots collaboration, a kind of many-to-many surveillance by mutual consent. If governance is to be democratic rather than Hobbesian, maintenance of social order requires technologies of mutual control."

We can think of citation as a kind of surveillance system constructed by the mutual consent of scholars and researchers. Through citation, scholars pay respect to the intellectual work of others, acknowledging contributions even as they criticize oversights. And, although MLA standards might at times come off as Hobbesian, we should remember that these standards change in response to new technologies through grass-roots practice (right?)

The digital world makes it quite easy to bypass such grassroot intellectual systems. As such, many Universities and academic institutions are turning to more top-down, rigid structures to ensure reputation (such Turnitin.com) or outlawing the use of digital environments altogether (such as the movement away from Wikipedia and digital sources).

I strive for a different solution. Rather than ignoring the pitfalls digital technologies engender, I seek to face them heads-on, discussing the epistemological and ethical challenges digital environments place on our intellectual traditions. Specifically, I believe that citation of web sources encourages students to be responsible, reputable net-i-zens.

End response. That's been sitting in a text-edit file on my desktop for a few days now, I figured rather than saving it to a corner of my hard-drive, I'd just shoot it out on the interweb. I've got to write my letter of application for my job market group this weekend, so perhaps I can revisit some of those ideas...(the current draft I have, which is terrible, discusses my dissertation, approach to new media, and approach to teaching in terms of fostering cohabitation and linking classical and contemporary theory to practice).

Computers, Writing, & Productive Mess

Just got back from Detriot and Computers & Writing, our talk went well. Three of us presented on wiring classrooms together for massive forum discussions (80 students participating in one discussion on the history of the higher education in the west). Here's a link to my Computers & Writing ppt.

Wired recently published an excerpt of David Weinberger's book Everything is Micellaneous. Weinberger introduces the selection, I really like the succinctness of this passage:

Until we started digitizing everything, we organized either the physical things themselves (what Everything Is Miscellaneous refers to as the first order of order) or we physically separated the information about the things and organized that (the second order): Think of books and card catalogs, or merchandise on racks and a catalog of products. With the third order, for the first time we can organize information, ideas and knowledge free of the limitations of the physical. And that enables us to get past the notion that there must a single right order, whether it's Aristotle's, God's, or Linnaeus' best guess.

I'm particularly fond of Weinberger's use of "messy"--in our C&W talk a coined the term "productive mess" to describe the chaotic kinds of rhetorical encounters students experience in online forums. Ideas don't necessarily synthesize cleanly or develop into neat and polished arguments. As student ideas come together, they break apart--encountering other opinions and the sharp edge of scrutiny. But these kinds of encounters are productive, depsite being messy than traditional (lets call it analog) writing.

Of course, my attraction to Weinberger is rooted in the similarity of our projects: the relationship between dynamic communication technologies and metaphysics of differAnce/Otherness over universalism and synthesis. Yup, that's my language, not his. But, our freedom from the imposed singularity of the physical will likely affect more than just information taxonomy, it will likely affect how we understand the subject who taxonomizes. New thinking will engender a new subject, hopefully one more connected to her social network and more responsible for her actions.