Joseph Pew and Latour's Third Position

Dave Weinberger has a live blog up today from Google's Chief Technology Advocate Michael T. Jones. Jones quotes Joseph Pew (1946): “Tell the truth and trust the people.” A quick search for the quote led me to the Pew history page, where it is accompanied by another quote by another member of the Pew family:

“No subversive forces can ever conquer a nation that has not first been conquered by ‘subversive inactivity’ on the part of the citizenry, who have failed in their civic duty and in service to their country.”

Another interesting point reported by Weinberger- "The [Pew] site shows that since 1980, the viewership of the evening news in the US has halved. Broadcasters ask where the audience went and how to get them back, which is the wrong question, he says; they went away by choice and you can’t force them back."

Rather than attempts to force them back (such as Rupert Murdoch's pay-for-access approach), Weinberger notes Jones's bullets:

How to solve the great problems of the publishing industry? 1. Please users. 2. Please customers. (Advertisers are the customers.) 3. Ask the right questions. 4. Accept change. 5. Embrace failure. 6. See the essence. Be sure you’re solving the right problem.

In some ways, I'll always remember Mxrk's take on this--just make it easier for people to pay. I'd add to that, only make us pay when we want to. If its good enough, then enough of us will want to. But, for that, you need to trust the people.

Toward Kair-erotically Thinking Techno-Determinism

I spent the morning today doing some reading/writing on my Computers and Writing presentation, which will deal explicitly with how social media played a role in diagnosing and dealing with my daughter's cancer. One article that I read today was John Potts' "Who's Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory." I like this article for its compact summary of Marshall McLuhan, and for its guilt-free recognition that technologies can have intrinsic properties and structuring effects on consciousness. Summarizing the woks of Havelock, McLuhan, Goddy, Watt, Ong, Eisenstein, Kittler, and Meyrowitz, Potts identifies one constant proposition: "as media technologies change, profound cultural effects ensue. These effects operate on both the level of the individual psyche and the social formation as a whole. The effects may be observed in the long historical span of inventions from literacy to interactive multimedia."

Human thinking of thought comes to resemble the media we use to capture, express and exchange that thinking on thought. At one point in time, humans created television; I might call this thinking "being-chronoslogically." But let's recognize that, at this moment, it is equally true that television creates humans, which would be thinking "becoming-kairoserotically. Chronological and Kairotic. History and Phenomenology. Logos and Eros. Kairos, phenomenology, and eros are the web (presented colloquially as transience, interactivity, plurality respectively in my dissertation). This is precisely why rhetoric, and more particularly Levinas, are central to my understanding of what the web could help us be-come.

Whether the relation between technology and subjectivity/sociality is a good thing is another discussion altogether. My reading today consisted of a number of cultural studies / neo-marxist / critical / materialist objections to the "social" media dominating today's communicative and cultural landscape. In short: the Web 2.0 honeymoon is over. Its a bit depressing, but requires our attention. I won't give it that attention right here, right now (but I will try to in the coming days). I will argue in a few weeks at C&W, these important analyses of the Internet's relation to capitalism and hegemonic power fail to account for the affective dimensions of the social web. Nor do they take into account the possibility that such affective and ethical relations could come to challenge their ontological-materialist-technological grounds. These critical theorists read "the medium is the message" quite literally--they track who owns and economically benefits from the medium at hand. I have Levinasian objections to this, but I will save those too for another post.

For this post, I'll follow Potts' suggestion that a little technodeterminism might not be such a bad thing if we want to reveal "the most profound and long-term cultural effects of those media." I say so provided we attempt to balance the "inherent properties of technologies" against economic, political, and social [and I wish I could here explicate this as Levinasian] considerations of media. We have to be responsible for the whole bag. Of course, I will recognize that the precise "inherent" properties of any medium are indeterminate--and we are talking in a speculative hermeneutic riddled with desire. This complexity does not make it a futile, irrelevant or dangerous task. Well, perhaps a dangerous one. But given that things so often become within the realm of possibility we imagine for them, it makes it all the more important a task. An essential task. Heidegger critiqued of Marx: "before a change in the world comes a conception of change in the world." Let's use technological determinacy as a vehicle for initiating-continuing-popularizing the construction of such a change.

Returning to my initial quote from Potts, perspective and scopes are the keys here ("the long historical span of inventions"). Materialist critiques focus on interpreting a now with a (linear) eye to the future. As one such theorist, David Golumbia offers in response to posthuman notions of transcendental change: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." His pessimism is routed in a narrow view of recent history (say 200 years) that documents how corporate and capitalist interests continually usurp individual choice into hegemonic, centralized institutions of power. From such a perspective, individuals are currently contributing (via free content) to their own subjugation, and the forms of power subjugating them are becoming increasingly invisible. Such a history becomes linear in the sense that there is little chance to break free (except, perhaps, for unplugging all our computers and reading all the Right [and by that, of course, I mean Left] books--sorry, couldn't help one cynical jab).

Against this pessimism, media theory would project a future from meager traces of the now and an interpretation of then. Its optimism is grounded in a long-look at human history documenting how media technology transforms social, political, and economic life. Most of those transformations are, in the long run, for the better for everyone involved. These transformations, however, did not take five, ten, or even twenty years. They took centuries. I would like to argue that this is thinking history (chronos) kairotically--to think of history as producing a present that generates the past, rather than thinking how the past caused the present. Either case, I would argue, is within view of infinite spectral futures that incessantly haunt us (that is, whether we are functions of the past or its originators, we are always, already haunted from the future, from the judge beyond the horizon of the time that unfolds).

And I would conclude by stressing that the future is as indeterminate as the absolute inherent properties of technologies. We will have to fight for any future we wish to come to be. The kairos for a potential chronos always begins now, in the stories we tell ourselves we are to Be-come.

Lessig's New Book

One of my heroes, Lawrence Lessig, has a new book out. While the website is up, the book isn't available for free yet (but I'm sure it will be soon). In the meantime, he recently gave an interview with Colbert.

I'll have to pick up Lessig's new book--I am interested in how this interview suggests a change in his argument. He seems to be completely rejecting copyright in this interview (vs. his more moderate position in earlier books). I am also a bit surprised about his "children" argument; I would think that pushing for the economic benefits of free-cultural exchange would be more persuasive to the Colbert audience. I guess its time I give Amazon more money...

Jim Corder as an Ethic for Blogging

Today I presented Jim Corder's "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love" to my expository writing class. I believe Corder's propositions for "writing with love" serve as particularly apt principles for approaching digital writing. Corder pushes for five core values:

• The writer is exposed "...the arguer is alone, with no assurance at all that the other or any audience will be kindly disposed")
• All writing is provisional ("we can learn to dispense with what we imagined was absolute truth and to pursue the reality of things only partially knowable")
• Writers are not authorities ("an authoritative position, anyway, is a prison both to us and to any audience")
• All writing by nature closes, we must work to attempt to keep it open ("Each utterance may deplete inventive possibilities if a speaker fails into arrogance, ignorance, or dogma. But each utterance, if the speaker having spoken, opens again, may also nurture and replenish the speaker's invective world and enable him or her to reach out around the other")
• Writing should be both personal and thoughtful--not detached, objective, or positively referential ("we must rescue time by putting it into our discourses and holding it there, learning to speak and write not argumentative displays and presentations, but arguments full of the anecdotal, personal, and cultural reflections that will make us plain to all others, thoughtful histories and narratives that reveal us as we're reaching for the others.")

As I was reading Corder today, I couldn't help but notice how much he shares with Levinas, especially in terms of fragmenting the stability of the subject-writer, of indebting the composition of the subject-writer to the author. Of thinking of writing other(than)wise.

I also find it interesting that, writing in 1987, Corder sees technology as speeding up time (he cites electronic mail as an example). I argue the opposite: that forums and especially wikis create a new lived experience of time. This new time somewhat (not completely) outs writing from time--frees us for contemplation and reflection.

Expository Writing as Digital Citizenship

Its a new semester, and I am teaching two sections of upper-division expository writing. I am excited to return to a previous approach: blogging as composition. Last time I tried this with freshman we and we were quite pleased with the results. Here's what this semester's course description looks like:

This course is an attempt to reimagine writing instruction, moving away from 20th century models based on print scholarship and toward 21st century models of digital citizenship. My premise: the purpose of the contemporary university has to be more attentive to maximizing new communicative tools, including blogs, wikis, aggregators, bookmarks, and networking technologies.

Traditional writing classes, especially those “academic” in nature, instruct students to write for imagined audiences. Unfortunately, in practice, this is rarely the case—students end up writing for “a general conversation of mankind.” For many complicated reasons, cutting edge writing instruction has denounced writing for this universal / incorporeal audience. Yet, few alternatives present themselves to instructors: who can students write to? Can authentic audiences be a part of writing instruction?

This class is my experimental answer to this question. I am refiguring the way we teach writing. This semester you will be writing to an audience of your choosing—but you will have to demonstrate to me an authentic relationship with this audience. You will be entering into a discourse community, participating in its social conventions, and reporting back to the class on its values, purposes, and intrigues.

To explain: this will be a course on blogging. This is not to say that this will be a course that uses blogs. I am proposing something a bit more extensive than that. I am proposing that blogging will not simply augment the material of the course, it will compose the material of the course. Playfully, composing blogs will be the expository exercise.

Simultaneously, we will be reading, discussing, and (of course) writing about the viability of blogging as an approach to expository writing. We will discuss the goals and purposes of the traditional expository class in relation to your experiences in this class. We will use a contemporary academic argument handbook, They Say, I Say, assessing whether the values of academic prose translate into blogging. In their work, Graff and Birkenstein argue that “rote instruction [has] indeed encouraged passivity and drained writing of its creativity and dynamic relation to the social world” (xv). This class, then, can be understood as an attempt to revitalize and reprioritize writing. I am looking to teach a form of writing that is creative, dynamic, an integrally tied to your social world.

This work will culminate in a discussion on the broader conceptualization of blogging within our social sphere. You will use your experiences as a blogger to respond to the contemporary debate concerning the rigor and value of blogs.

This course will be run as a creative writing workshop. I imagine all of you will be writing on different topics (and entering into different communities, crafting different voices, different styles of blogs). Our class sessions, then, will be dedicated to providing peers with meaningful and helpful feedback (critical in its least pejorative sense). You should be prepared to share your work, ideas, and thoughts in a respectful manner.

The course, then, is an extension of my previous semester: on the purpose of higher education. I am further attempting to move beyond the Ruins of the Enlightenment institution, the knowledge factory, and toward something more social, democratic (?), and connected.

Global Information Killed the Local Newspaper Star

James Surowiecki has a nice and short article in this month's New Yorker on the death of newspapers. For those who remember Danny Devito in Other People's Money, its pretty much the buggy whip argument (movie is down below, skip ahead to 2:30)--but a bit more complicated. It is not a simple matter of an industry becoming outdated, but of an industry not recognizing the most vital aspect of its operation. Newspapers shouldn't conceptualize themselves as being in the print business, rather, they are in the information business. Had they realized this 15 years ago, they could have done more to network and prevent things like CraigList, Monster, etc. from taking over a large part of their business--communicating vital information and networking strangers.

I do find a particular irony in Surowiecki's article: so often we think of the internet as promoting local relations. By putting media back into the hands of the people (to channel some Gillmor), the internet provides more and more local broadcasting. It creates voices outside of the major media centers. But, as Surowiecki explains, it is also killing the local newspaper--since so much information is out there for free.

I wonder where people will read obituaries once the local paper has died.

There is another disturbing suggestion in Surowiecki's argument--the return of patronage. Perhaps patronage of the newspaper is no different than that of PBS, but the thought of news media outlets relying on the generosity of the wealthy scares me. I don't want the news to be purchased. Fox news is bad enough. Let's not return to a medieval system where every party has their own scribe competing to present the truth. Oh, wait... I think we already have that... But let's at least attempt to maintain an air of objectivity that allows me to think the system is working...

Someone Tell Me If I Like This...

Something bugs me about this video. I watch a lot of the "times-they-are-a-changin'" videos, but don't know what to make of this. But my Blink sense is tingling...

Since I'm teaching my digital citizenship course next semester, I think I'll use this in class.

Obama goes to work

As I recently mentioned, I primarily voted for Obama based on his stance toward net neutrality. Obama has decided to appoint our nation's first Chief Technology Officer. User Voice, a social aggregator, has set up an interesting forum to discuss the priorities for the new appointment. Very interesting, but it is unclear whether Obama knows the site exists. The site details that "official reviews" are coming, but doesn't say who the officials are...

Regardless, take a minute to read through some of the excellent suggestions, vote, and ponder whether the previous administration would even consider for a milli-second the idea of digital public opinion.

And, Mxrk, don't waste a vote on the guy developing sharks with "lazers."

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.

New Media Rhetoric and Wikipedia

I thought I would share my conference proposal for International Society for the History of Rhetoric conference. I have a feeling its probably a bit too contemporary (ie, it mentions computers) for this conference, but there's no harm in trying. The talk would be building off of what I'll be discussing at RSA later this month: though that talk focuses on the complex ways [non-Platonic/Aristotelian] in which Wikipedia establishes credibility. I'll post links to that material later. I guess my preoccupation with wikis extends from their complete "newness"- there's really nothing in history that compares to the magnitude to which they precipitate, harness, and purpose human interaction and thinking. Anywho, here's the proposal:

In We the Media, journalist turned new media proponent Dan Gillmor argues that digital technologies present us with an entirely new form of communication; in addition to “one-to-one” communication (which we can identify with dialectic) and “one-to-many” (rhetoric), digital technologies offer “many-to-many” communication (26). As Gillmor demonstrates through an examination of contemporary blogs, forums, wikis, and social aggregators, audiences are no longer exterior, static entities to be acted upon. They are now far more active agents in a far more dynamic communicative process.

I argue that this developing communicative medium will further push rhetoric to break away from its Platonic / Aristotelian preoccupation with objective truth and persuasion. As audiences gain more response ability, rhetors will have to work with audiences rather than upon them. The dynamism of digital communicative environments, in addition to their emphasis on collecting intelligence, will call for a rhetoric more concerned with fostering collaboration than producing terminal synthesis.

This does not mean that rhetoric should abandon all discussion of persuasion, only that its focus needs to expand to include non-synthetic negotiation of difference. I will offer as example of this dual need a presentation of Wikipedia. The “article” dimension of a Wikipedia entry reflects a traditional interest in truth and knowledge production. But every Wikipedia entry is more than just its “article”: it is a massive collection of pages, including a lively “discussion” section and a history of all changes made to a page. Every knowledge object becomes embedded in a web of social relations. These other, more social, dimensions to each entry symbolize the ways in which “many-to-many” communication is changing our information landscape and suggest how rhetoric needs to augment persuasion with an interest in cooperation.

I will conclude by arguing this transformation is anticipated in the work of Burkian rhetorical theorist Jim Corder. Throughout the mid-1980’s Corder argued that the work of rhetoric extended beyond persuasion to something more akin to “love.” Designed to deal with the intensified wrangle of the digital barnyard, a rhetoric of cooperation builds off of Corder and Burke by emphasizing that the ends of rhetoric aren’t always concerned with persuasion—sometimes they are concerned with keeping the conversation hospitable, active, and inviting.

New Media Rhetoric

The first paragraph of George Oates' recent A List Apart article "Community: From Little Things, Big Thigns Grow" reflects something I've been trying to articulate for a few years:

People don’t like being told what to do. We like to explore, change things around, and make a place our own. Hefty design challenges await the makers of websites where people feel free to engage; both with the system itself and with each other. Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can’t predict—they’ll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

I've been writing the theoretical chapter of my dissertation, a chapter that focuses on Levinas' rejection of Cartesian consciousness, the primacy of ontology, and the fetish for Being. Along the way, I've come to recognize why Levinas (and myself) distrust Platonic / Aristotelian rhetoric: it presumes a rhetorician acting upon an audience. Audience members are framed at best as deliberating judges or at worst as passive receptacles.

But, by empowering audiences, equipping them with responsibility, new media technologies oppose this imposed passivity. For better or worse. Perhaps we will lose patience. Perhaps we won't listen long enough before we begin to speak. Or perhaps we will. I admit I only read the first few paragraphs of the article before I felt compelled to write a post, to respond, to create, to link, to contribute. And what we need is a rhetoric that focuses on these dynamics--group dynamics. A working with rather than a working on. In Oates' article we hear a call of what such a rhetoric might look like:

Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.” It simply must happen gradually. It must be cared for, and hosted; it takes time and people with great communication skills to set the tone and tend the conversation.

When Flickr was born, Caterina Fake and I spent many hours greeting new members personally. We opened up chat windows with each new visitor to say “Hi! I work here, and I’d love to help you get started, if you have any questions.” We also provided public forums where staff were present and interactive. Those decisions proved crucial, because apart from creating points where we could inject a certain culture, it was all so personal.

If you want to stir your audience on a rapidly growing community site, take advantage of what we learned—hire a community manager. Or two. You’ll need a clever communicator with a lot of experience being online to help welcome people and provide ongoing support as your community grows. Show your personality and be available. Flickr’s tone is not necessarily suitable for every community, but the point is, the tone is evident everywhere you look.

I like that, in describing Flickr's origins, Oates states that they were looking to construct a culture. Rhetors can still have a purpose, they can still seek to act upon, to persuade (to use a word that I consider quite dirty). They retain a sense of agency. But "action" is framed as dialectical- or, and we don't have a word for this yet- plural-ectical. Multiple? Complex? Rhetoricians are clever communicators; clever [digital] communicators are those who generate discussion among persons; discussion, interaction, contact: the basis of a functional community.

For a few centuries, or millennia (?), intellectual activity has been primarily identified as an individual activity, even if the end result of this activity contributes to a society of scholars or Great Conversation. It would seem we are approaching a new era in which intellectual activity, while at times still very much a singular experience, is also at other times very much different from this tradition. Here's the idea I've been tripping over: might our new media come to represent a bridge between two long opposed intellectual traditions: rhetoric and dialectic? Is this the explication of Dan Gilmor's claim that the internet, for the first time, provides us with many to many conversation? Excuse the questions, but this is one of those ideas that I realize I should have put together awhile ago. Its one of those ideas that I've been teaching to long before I could articulate.

Tools such as del.icio.us and Google Docs are beginning to reshape our intellectual landscape. I am interested in the development of rhetoric (and composition) pedagogy that addresses these possibilities; and I believe we can turn to other disciplines, conversations, people (such as Oates) to see what kinds of preparation could benefit 21st century citizens.

Violence and Metaphysics, part 2

Some rough draft I was working through today:

The best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which makes the search for an archia tremble. Only the thought of Being can do so, and not traditional ‘philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics.’ The latter are therefore ‘politics’ which can escape ethical violence only by economy: by battling violently against the violences of the an-arhy whose possibility, in history, is still the accomplice of archism.” (“V&M” 141)

The violence here comes both from theory and totality (knowledge) and from the search for foundations and hierarchy(ontology). Knowing is always a political act, often a totalitarian one, which subsumes the alterity of others (our act of theorizing them as existents reduces the possibilities of what they may be, and of what Being might be in general). For Levinas, then, there is a great suspicion of knowledge and the desire to know, of traditional philosophy and metaphysics, of any thought principally concerned with discerning archia.

Hence why Levinas insists that our relation to the other is not a knowledge (and Derrida repeatedly points out that Heidegger’s conceptualization of Being is not as a genre or category of knowledge). Our relation to the Other, or our relation to Being, both transcend positive knowledge. They are the something through which “knowledge,” and language as a precondition of knowledge, emerges. The transcendental relationship between Being and Other thus, from first principle, suspend all knowledge. The “thought of Being,” as Derrida puts it above, is the question of Being- a continual (let’s say deconstructive, to use the term in its “proper” sense) questioning of the transcendental property of Being. Such impossibility, emanating from the core of all knowing, opens us to an ethics mindful of the requisite violence of theorization, communication, philosophy, and rhetoric.

For Levinas, a suspension of the primacy of Being opens us to the ethical- rather than considering others as Beings (which requires an act of ontology, categorization, theorization, etc). Levinas places the thought of Being (a questioning of Being’s primacy atypical for traditional philosophy) at the forefront of his thinking. Derrida notes:

Not only is the thought of Being not ethical violence, but it seems that no ethics—in Levinas’s sense—can be opened without it. Thought—or at least the precomprehension of Being—conditions (in its own fashion, which excludes every ontic conditionality: principles, causes, premises, etc.) the recognition of the essence of the existent (for example, existent as other, as other self, etc.). It conditions respect for the other as what it is, other. Without this acknowledgement, which is not a knowledge, or let us say without this “letting-be” of an existent (Other) as something existing outside me in the essence of what it is (first in its alterity), no ethics would be possible” (137-38)

In the first line above, Derrida stresses that Levinas’s questioning of Being, though disrupting the classical foundations for ethics, actually seeks to extend the possibility of ethics by reducing the security with which we think “presence” and “truth.” Let me playfully suggest that the conditions of digitality, both social and material, that I have elucidated in chapters one and two suggest the possibility for “letting-be”: for experiencing and respecting the other as other. At the heart of this suggestion lies the transience, uncertainty, and anxiety attached to the medium. To be clear: such conditioning and respect does not promise to end violence- there is no final idealism here. But I do assert a hope, albeit a tentative one, that exposure to the conditions of conditionality, to the transience, uncertainty, and anxiety of the digital, can temper the violence of politics, ontology, communication, possibility, life. To understand how the digital might promote such “letting-be,” we must familiarize ourselves with another critical and complex Levinasian concept: the face, and its relation to metaphysical ethics.

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).

Rosa & Acceleration

(I thought I might share some recent reading notes for my dissertation, I think there's something in here for everyone. Please excuse the awkwardness of the prose, this is first draft. Overall, Rosa's article is insightful and definately worth a read)

Rosa, Hartmut. "Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society." Constellations 10.1 (2003) 3-33.

Rosa seeks to explore a fifth an often overlooked facet of late-modernism (which she resists calling postmodernism, seeing more of a connection than a break). In addition to differentation, rationalization, individuation, and domestication, she wishes to explore acceleration--the ways in which our pace of lives has increased. She notes that the four common concepts all come with a social paradox--for instance differentiation generates disintegration, rationalization generates Weber's "Iron Cage" (trapped by inflexible logic and unwavering faith in rationality), individuation generates mass culture, and domestication of nature, which leads to possible environmental disaster. Acceleration, too, comes with its own paradox: as our production and media speed up, one would think we are left with more time. However, Rosa explains that this speed up, along with a shift in metaphysical orientation from primarily the next world to this one, actually leaves with less time--feeling more overburdened and hurried. Time, which would seemingly become abundant, ends up becoming scarce.

Here's a passage for Casey and Brian:

The idea of the fulfilled life no longer supposes a "higher life" waiting for us after death, but rather consists in realizing as many options as possible from the vast possibilities the world has to offer. To taste life in all its heights and depths and in its full complexity becomes a central aspiration of modern man. But, as it turns out, the world always seems to have more to offer than can be experienced in a single lifetime[...] The eudaimonistic promise of modern acceleration thus appears to be a functional equivalent to religious ideas of eternity or "eternal life," and the acceleration of "the pace of life" represents the modern answer to the problem of finitude and death. (13)

Explication: so many video games, so little time. In seriousness, this is how Rosa explains the cultural phenomenon of "zapping" channels--as more options grow, so to grows the anxiety of what we're missing on the other channel. Hence we have "the paradoxical phenomenon of simultaneous technological acceleration and increasing time scarcity" (14). Very Smart

So much for the explication, let's move on to the meet. My first disagreement with Rosa concerns how technology affects space (and, by extension, place). She writes:

...in the age of globalization and the u-topicality of the Internet, time is increasingly conceived as compressing or annihilating space. Space, it seems, virtually 'contracts' and loses its significance for orientation in the late modern world. Processes and developments are no longer located and locations become 'non-liuex,' without history, identity, or relation. (6-7)

Although this topic is covered only briefly, I propose that Rosa is collapsing the distinction between space and place. Space is a non-topical description-- it is, rather, place that we think of in terms of strict geography and coordinates. And it is place that has largely dominated communication throughout time. The Modern (and postmodern) periods can be marked with the dissolution of place's control over communication and rhetorical encounter: the letter, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the motion picture, the television, and the internet all breakdown the necessity for sharing a place to communicate. But the spaces in which we communicate are equally as present, even if the others with which we once communicated are no absent (in their own spaces). Rather than losing significance in our accelerated world, the ambiguous sense of space (versus the iron cage sense of place) increases in importance. What is annihilated is the common and seemingly obvious security of shared places. Places are overwritten with the idiosyncracy and temporality of the digital. This is perhaps more apparent in places such as Singapore, where an emphasis on mobile technology has led to virtual signposts--street corners are packed with user messages that other users naturally encounter. On a more theoretical level, the non-place, non-topicality of the internet reminds us that the places we inhabit--the street corner, the office, the home-- are all largely socially constructed. Its is a reminder that we can no longer imagine one world (one place), but an infinite series of spaces, overlapping and shared. Here again, we see the need for a rhetoric that supports multiplicity and respects the view of others. [Rosa cites Paul Harvey here, p. 201f and 272f).

If I need someone to argue that technology greatly impacts life, she does so (12).

Second course:

The acceleration of rates of social change to an intra- rather than inter- generational pace is mirrored in a language which avoids identity predicates and uses temporary markers instead. People speak of working (for the time being) as a baker rather than being a baker, living with Mary rather than being Mary's husband, going to the Methodist Church rather than being a Methodist, voting Republican rather than being a Republican, and so on. This use of language indicates that the awareness of contingency has increased even where the actual rates of change have not yet done so: things (jobs, spouses, religious and political commitments, etc.) could be otherwise, they could change at any time because of either my own or other people's decisions. (19)

While I agree with Rosa that acceleration factors into this development, I think there is more at work here, something extra-egoitst. There is an increased expectation of otherness- the other to whom I speak might be a single, Jewish, Democratic person alergic to flour. Poor thing, cake is yummy. So, while I agree that we no longer as easily associate ourselves with the reverence of BEING, that we are far more aware of our contingent constitution, we are also more aware that such contingency is caused as much by others (their judgments as well as their actions) as acceleration.

In a line of argumentation that would make McLuhan proud, Rosa explains that the perspectives through which people organize their lives are changing drastically (19). She writes:

"Classical" modern identities were consequently long term projects supposed to evolve like a Bildungsroman. In late modernity, however, this pattern no longer holds: neither work- nor family-life can be foreseen or planned for a lifetime. Instead, people develop a new perspective that has been oddly termed the "temporalization of time": time-spans and the sequence of duration of activities or commitments are no longer planned ahead but left to evolve. Such a temporalization of time, however, is equivalent to the de-temporalization of life: life is no longer planned along a line that stretches from the past to the future; instead, decisions are taken from "time to time" according to situational and contextual needs and desires. (19)

The medium, then, is the message: no longer a linear form, now--hmm, what a word we could use here... something that relates to media technology but isn't linear in fashion... rather, it should suggest a series of choices, only a limited number of which can be selected.... Our dominant media practices come to influence our metaphysics. Rosa concludes:

However we evaluate this phenomenon, the incompatibility of "situational" identities with the modern ideal of individual ethical autonomy is apparent. For the ideal of the autonomous and reflective leading of a life requires adopting long-term commitments which bestow a sense of direction, priority, and 'narratability' to life. (20)

I agree with Rosa completely on this point, although I'm not sure we feel the same way about this development. I see this as a moment of liberation, a positive change, but I am suspect that autonomy leads to anything ethical. "Ethical autonomy" is something of an oxy moron. From a Levinasian perspective, the strict linearity of the novel equates to a form of tyranny--an isolated form at that. This is not to say that I don't enjoy being tyrannized every so often, but this is not the dominant model for a hyper-connected world, one in which our social contacts are vastly increased. I would also say that we do not need the strict plot of a novel to bestow a sense of direction, but we do need to face the risk and insecurity that can come from merely surfing. Whether, as a culture, we are willing to return to such a Hellenic metaphysic remains to be seen.

Rosa's article exposes the extent to which accerlation is impacting contemporary society, down to its core assumptions regarding subjectivity, ethics, and metaphysics. The contemporary subject is more aware of contigency and less likely to envision their live according to the rigidity of Being. From marriage, to career, to political and relgious affiliations, we see an increasing acceptance of "becoming." Rosa suggests that, without the drive of a linear plot, our lives are heading toward a kind of social inertia (20). We can ask if, alongside this sense of becoming, a more Hellenic / Sophistic ethic will emerge: one in which linear progression is more equated with tyranny, where individual autonomy gives way to group tolerance.

Victory is (sorta) Ours!

SoundExchange (representing the music industry) has agreed to re-think its fee structure for internet radio, 16 days before the killer rate increase. DiMA has a mixed review to the announcement. While many people are questioning the move, it at least suggests that SoundExchange is willing to come to the table and is a bit fearful to take the matter before Congress.

Help Save the Music

Today is a "Day of Silence" for internet radio, the SaveNetRadio Coalition is encouraging all internet radio stations to go silent for one day in protest of the extreme rate hikes expected to go into effect July 15th. Although I don't listen to internet radio, I see this as a crisis. This rate hike would kill off many, if not the majority, of internet radio stations. This would be a major blow for the "many-to-many" dynamic of the internet and would move us toward a centralized, command and control media online. Boo. Read/Write web has a nice summation of the issue.

A few months ago I signed a few digital petitions and emailed my congressmen, now it seems its time to up the ante. The coalition is asking everyone to call their congressman in support of net radio, specifically to endorse the "Internet Radio Equality Act," which would have internet radio stations share the same amount of profits as satellite radio stations already do (7.5%).

Please help save the net.

Victory is (Almost) Mine! (Standards Compliant Slideshow via ImageShack)

I recently finished working with a local dog group on a website redesign. Intially, I was particularly proud to recreate what was a table-based layout in xhtml and css. Later, the group decided they wanted to make some significant changes and I taught my wife enough Fireworks and Dreamweaver for her to redesign the color scheme. We worked together and remain married. Go us. But that's not today's victory.

From the beginning of the project the group wanted some kind of photo gallery for the site. The problem: how do I create a standards-compliant site that group members can easily update? My first idea was to use Flash to create a gallery. But this didn't seem like a good option, since images need to be re-sized before they are added to a collection, and every update means going in and editing the flash file. No...no..no. I also thought about using Javascript (I've done this before for Purdue's GradSEA), but this technique isn't standards-compliant.

Reading a Mashable article on image editing resources yesterday, I came across a link to ImageShack--a photo hosting service that allows users to easily create slideshows and pumps out code to embed the shows on other websites (kind of like the libraryThing widget Michael uses on Wishydig, but using Flash rather than Java). The problem? Embeds are banned by the w3c--use the easy widget, lose your validation. All seemed lost. Especially since the classic fix for embed, McLellan's satay method, works best when you can create a container moive. This wasn't the case. Then I remembered (via del.icio.us) Elizabeth Castro's article on how McLellan's technique can be used on Google Video and YouTube movies without the satay...

When you complete a slide show with ImageShack (and you don't have to register to create a slideshow, but you do have to register to be able to edit a show), it will produce this code:

<embed src="http://img515.imageshack.us/slideshow/smilplayer.swf" width="426" height="320" name="smilplayer" id="smilplayer" bgcolor="FFFFFF" menu="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="id=img515/8742/1182697433ltj.smil"/>

Following along with McLellan and Castor, we want to transform this embed into an object:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://img515.imageshack.us/slideshow/smilplayer.swf"
width="400" height="326" id="VideoPlayback">
<param name="movie"
value="id=img515/8742/1182697433ltj.smil"/>
<param name="allowScriptAcess" value="sameDomian" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="playerMode=embedded" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="id=img515/8742/1182697433ltj.smil"/>
</object>

The key to getting this puppy working is to include the unique id as a FlashVars parameter (the final line of the code). Google and Youtube supply each movie with its own URL, ImageShack doesn't--rather, it assigns each slideshow a unique id in its database. So, bottom line, you have to include this id to get the show rolling. The only line I am unsure of is the "allowScriptAcess" line--it was in Castor's code, but I'm not sure if its necessary. I tried removing it and the slideshow still played in Safari, but I'm not sure if it is an IE command (with the satay method, IE doesn't like auto-starting... if anyone has IE, let me know if this is working, I promise not to chastise you too much for using IE).

Victory is mine! And, best of all, ImageShack is an awesome 2.0 app--it automatically resizes images, allows for easy captions, allows users to re-order images, determine background color, tag presentations, import images from Flickr or other URL's (as well as direct upload), choose transition effects, add music (please don't), and make shows public or private. And now, thanks to A List Apart and some wranglin', it can be standards-compliant. Cool.

Here's the final, standards-compliant code in action:
Go to ImageShack® to Create your own Slideshow

UPDATE: Things aren't going quite so smoothly with my actual dog park moive. Yesterday, while working on the slideshow above, I noticed that the ImageShack server was reacting really slowly at times. I finished a sample dog park slide show last night, and it works fine through the standard embed method, my object method is running into problems:
Go to ImageShack® to Create your own Slideshow

I have no idea why this movie isn't loading....

UPDATE: I am dumb. Problem solved. Already sent "I'm an idiot" email to ImageShack (see my comment... before I delete it). Now I have to write this post up into something a bit more constructive and submit it to imageshack's tutorial contest...

UPDATE:

Apparently the video is only working in Safari. I'm going to play with it this evening. If any visitors are looking at this post, can you tell me 1) what browser you are using [IE 6, Firefox 1.5 etc.] and 2) whether you see two movies above. Thanks.

UPDATE: O.k., its working in Firefox 2.0.0.1. But IE is being terribly tiresome. Back to the drawing board later?

There goes Obi-Wan

I read a kind of farewell post over at Lawrence Lessig's blog yesterday with a heavy heart. Lessig announced that he will be changing the focus of his research and activism, moving away from intellectual property and net neutrality and toward what he terms political corruption: the influence of money and greed on political process. No doubt one reason he's come to this decision is the massive amounts of corruption plaguing ip debates. And while I am happy to have someone as brilliant as Lessig on the case, I'm also feeling as if the digital collective has lost its most powerful ally: a figurehead that other figureheads will listen to. While he claims that others can fight the fight better than he, I don't know of anybody that can command attention like he can. Perhaps that's the whole rhetoric part of my brain kicking in (ethos is, um, important).

Lessig himself admits that the prospects for this second venture are extremely grim. Hopeless. And I think that's what bothers me-- the digital battle doesn't seem quite as hopeless. And this year will be one of its most important: as we move toward our next presidential election, issues such as net neutrality should be near the forefront. Probably won't be, but should be. If internet service providers gain the power to regulate content types, then you can kiss the internet as we know it goodbye. If the government continues to claim regulatory power, then kiss the internet as we know it goodbye (think of China-- where it seems they're always thinking about the children). These are not the dystopic ravings of a mad man (o.k., maybe a little bit), they are political questions facing all three branches of government in the upcoming years. They will largely determine the economic and cultural directions of our country for decades to come.

Lessig writes that he will remain committed to this cause, if not as active. Let's hope his presence is enough. And let the rest of us see this as a call to increase our own activity.

Sorry Casey, Still No Flying Cars

This article by Charlie Stross is making its way through the interweb. Like some of the research I am working on Stross argues that the "progress" of the future won't concern processing power, software engineering, or even (Other help us) internet governance (which I assume includes front end and back end web design). Stross:

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

The future, argues Stross, lies in the often overlooked rise of "bandwidth" (and Stross defines this term broadly as the speed and capacity to transfer information--from an airliner shipping DVDs to the hard cable feeding my digital cable). Looking at this bandwidth increase, Stross imagines an archived future--every minute of every day of every person on the planet; a completely searchable human archive: as he puts it "think of it as google for real life." Of course, such an archive risks abuse--and Stross is quite concerned for the types of abuse on the horizon. But also, this future is rife with possibility:

And with ubiquitous lifelogs, and the internet, and attempts at providing a unified interface to all interesting information — wikipedia, let's say — we're going to give future historians a chance to build an annotated, comprehensive history of the entire human race. Charting the relationships and interactions between everyone who's ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that is about to be born this century.

Total history — a term I'd like to coin, by analogy to total war — is something we haven't experienced yet. I'm really not sure what its implications are, but then, I'm one of the odd primitive shadows just visible at one edge of the archive: I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first forty or fifty years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants' relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.

As a Levinasian, I hope the depth of total history actually resists totality--by exposing us not only to similarities, but to differences. To expose ourselves before the machinations (human and computer) without a presumption of synthesis, but rather with a nod toward complexity. Such an exposure, however, must be cultivated. And therein lies the rub, since "cultivate" is a secular humanist term for "indoctrinate." But I'd like to think that I choose my symbolic violences wisely.

For those down with the "blogging" syllabus, this might be an interesting article for discussion early on: why should English classes deal with blogging? Because sharing information is "the way of the future." And it deserves critical attention--not only in terms of invention, but also in terms of ethics.

New Media, Video Games, and Interactivity

Feels like forever since I put up a quality post, hope to change that today. I've been copyediting a forthcoming book on new media and its impact on traditional conceptions of mind and body. Essentially, the author convincingly argues that new media continue / engender the deconstructive project: that mind and body can no longer be "split," that consciousness can no longer be considered as stable or unified. He seeks to show that our media have always intended to cover up this lack of unity (even going as far back as spoken language, a move that decontextualizes meaning from presence--every move away from presence continues a fragmentation of consciousness). Good book, I'll write more on this later. In discussing new media, the author brings up Lee Manovich's exceptions to describing new media as "interactive." The argument: media have always been interactive, since all literature requires the participation of human cognition. I feel this is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in academia. Serisously. Especially since our first method for articulating digital text production on the internet (HYPERtext) stresses a-linearity. User participation. Its been a few years since I have written anything in this area, but I still tend to agree with Espen Aarseth: much of new media does stress interactivity (what Aarseth refers to as ergodic textuality), actually relies on it--not just to ascribe, decode, realize meaning, but more importantly to order, arrange, generate, enact plot / narrative. Not all video games, therefore, are ergodic. But this is a direction that some gaming genres are moving in: I think a great example is the early Silent Hill games, where character choices determine ending. There are certainly even more fluid environments (Fable comes to mind), not to mention dynasty sport games, second life simulation games, and MMO-RPG games. What makes these new (mediated) forms of experience is that people can interact in unpredictable ways to control the direction of the story. Sure there's still FF games, which, despite presenting expansive environments, follow linear plots. But to ignore the depth of interactive experience new media invloves is, well, quite ridiculous to me. I never mean to insinuate that humans can do without story. Far too much Aristotle and Johnson as an undergrad for that (and I'm a plot junkie to boot). There will always be an exhiliration tied to a great twist--an affective attachment to the unfolding of the unknown. But there is a new exhiliration available to a wide range of people-not an unfolding of the unknown, but the construction of it. An this is an equally affective experience. For instance, I am currently playing MLB: 2007, The Show, trying to make the Red Sox as a third baseman. Recently, I got called up to the majors, only to sit on the bench behind perennial all-star and gold glover Mike Lowell. I even asked Terry Francona (my manager) for a spot start twice--and both times he laughed in my face. That hurt. I really mean, I had a visceral reaction to failure--I felt frustration. And this frustration feeds into a plot that is dynamically emerging. Now, back in triple A, every time I hit a homerun (10 in 130 at bats) or drive in a clutch RBI (34 ribs in 31 games), I imagine what the Boston media might be asking Francona: when will the kid get a chance? And everytime I stirk out (which, I am ashamed to admit is quite often--I currently have six walks and 31 strikeouts), I imagine Francona and Epstein reminding the media that there 19 year old prospect needs to learn more plate discipline (earlier in the year I had a 21 walk to 23 strikeout ratio in double A, time to relax at the plate). My point, if I have one, is that video games facilitated cathartic / affective responses in "new" ways. So, I think I can make a strong case for how video games (if we consider them among new media) mandate that interactivity remains a key term in discussions / definitions of new media. Up next: how the internet is fundamentally interactive. Oh: I saw a trailer for this new game Portal this morning on G4tv. Looks VERY cool. Hope it comes out for Wii. Hope I can finally find a f@cking Wii.