digital digs

The Two Virtuals

                 

The second installment in my hopefully ungoing video blog series. A discussion of my forthcoming book from Parlor Press, The Two Virtuals. The video covers the intersection of the "technological virtual" with a "philosophical virtual" theory of materiality.

the positive confluence of academia and the web

My last post was quite critical, which is fine sometimes, but I prefer to shape my energies in more proactive directions. Clearly one of the challenges academia faces is to figure out a productive use of networks in terms of research practices. Usually I write more about the teaching aspects of the university and clearly there are many ways universities will employ networks. But I want to think specifically about the use of the web for research with a few goals in mind:

• to enhance collaboration between academics
• to publish and share research
• to share knowledge with a broader audience (students, governments, industries, non-profits, the general public, and so on)

One might say that these have been answered, but the real challenge is that as the web continues to evolve and now converge with other networks, the practices we have established need to change as well. That is, from the inception of the web, one could find the appearance of academic journals: genuine, rigorously reviewed, academic scholarship available freely online. There were (and are) listservs that might facilitate collaboration. Similarly individual faculty and faculty organizations built websites where they offered information, policy statements, and so on (NCTE or MLA for example in English Studies). But how are we moving forward?

intellectual elitism and Britannica blog

Michael Gorman proclaims his support for intellectual elitism and meritocracy on Britannica blog. The post meanders through a couple of points as near as I can figure out, each questionable.

1. Gorman begins with poorly formed potshots at literacy and intelligence that amount to nothing more than an ideological proclamation for cultural conservatism. Gorman then writes "Perhaps these are elitist ideas?  So be it.  Learning and education are enterprises in which the academically gifted prosper and are justified in prospering." I actually don't think these are elitist ideas. They are instead rather simplistic, everyday notions. It's actually fairly anti-intellectual to proclaim "I know what 'literacy' and 'intelligence' are." Furthermore, placing faith in the idea of an intellectual meritocracy seems hopelessly naive, and it would be just plain silly and stunningly ignorant to imagine that Wikipedia is the only thing standing between us and some utopian society goverened by the wise.

If only it were easy to determine who had intelligence. If only it were easy to define literacy. If only it were easy to create a system where those with merit were rewarded. I am totally stunned that a person like Gorman who has lived his professional life in academia could believe that education rewards the "academically gifted" in some unproblematic way that is not overdetermined by ideology and material contexts.

The challenges of the creative class for professional writing students

affective economics

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins writes about "affective economics:" 

which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions. In many ways, affective economics represents an attempt to catch up with work in cultural studies ... There is a crucial difference, however: the cultural studies work sought to understand media consumption from the fan's point of view, articulating desires and fantasies that were ill-served by the current media system; the new marketing discourse seeks to mold these consumer desires to shape purchasing decisions. (62)

Jenkins' observation resonates for me with Deleuze's accounting of the emergence of the "control society" as a micropolitical refinement of the panoptic techniques of Foucault's disciplinary society. As Jenkins has it, affective economics is about establishing interactive brand communities, for example, the cross media excitment around American Idol.

intellectual climate and the "creative class"

I just read through Richard Florida's Flight of the Creative Class. It's an interesting read. I realize Florida has been targeted by both the left and the right. His argument resonates in many ways with Friedman's flat world or Pink's whole new mind. I don't have much to offer on the overall validity of this argument except the following. First, I agree that we are in the midst of a shift in economics that is closely related to work of people the fall into Florida's definition of a "creative class." Second, my intuition (for what that's worth) leads me to agree with the contention that members of the creative class seek out jobs and cities where they feel free to express themselves and where there is a high level of acceptance for different people.

My interest here though is thinking about what Florida's theories might suggest for a college community like Cortland's, especially in terms of "intellectual climate" (an issue of ongoing concern on campus). Not surprisingly, Florida (an academic himself), like Friedman and others, points to the importance of education--primary, secondary, and tertiary--for creating a "creative society." Universities are one of the characteristics of cities that make them desirable to creative types. Universities research new technologies as well as offering access to technologies; they attract talented people (both faculty and students); and they teach tolerance for different people (the there "T's" that Florida discusses). However, smaller colleges face different kinds of challenges.

desert of the real

web 2.0, "open source," and the filter

Hmmm... some scare quotes in that title huh? Well. It's a result of my continuing to respond to this conversation on Brittanica Blog. I'm really hoping that the participants will move on to more sophisticated and productive discourse. But here's some more. Gregory McNamee describes "open source" as a model

in which one opinion is as good as the next until it is shouted down, regardless of credentials or qualifications—indeed, in which credentials or qualifications scarcely enter into the discussion. That sham democracy has to allow for the opinions of people who may not be qualified to hold them: that’s the built-in dilemma of the enterprise. Everyone has the right to an opinion, of course, but that does not mean that one opinion is as good as another...

The interesting dilemma though, if we were to accept this definition, is that open source works. There are many instances of the success of open source. Of course open source projects sometimes fail, but projects of all sorts sometimes fail.

The problem with this entire line of reasoning in most of these posts at Britannica is that they unnecessarily conflate different attributes of a discourse community.

More on Britannica's Web 2.0 debate

A continuing conversation on Britannica's blog about Web 2.0. At this point, it's basically Michael Gorman (former president of ALA) and Andrew Keen (author of the Cult of the Amateur) vs. Clay Shirky (of Many-to-Many and points beyond).

Here is where I totally agree with Gorman:

Let me be clear at the outset, the Internet in particular and the digital resources available to us in general are ineluctable forces that are shaping our lives, in many ways for the better. We cannot turn away from these forces, nor should we.  But we must exercise judgment, use digital resources intelligently, and import into the digital world the values that have pervaded scholarship in Western societies for many centuries.

We may disagree over how that "importing" will happen and what it might mean. Though I think we have some decent range of agreement there.

port authority

Authority and expertise in a networked culture... it's not a new problem. "Wisdom of the crowd"/ collective intelligence vs. individual genius? Sifting through all the dross, all the ideology, all the self-promotion, and all the poorly composed media.

Yes, all that. My students are talking about it as we read Dan Gillmor's We the Media. But I'm also picking up on a conversation from Will Richardson and over on the Britannica Blog (raise your hand if you're surprised about skepticism regarding Web 2.0 on the "Britannica Blog").

Undoubtedly one of the major challenges as we move into a networked media culture is negotiating the avalanche of information that we must deal with. Some of that information is important only in a short-term and personal context, like a text message or phone call. Much of the information we deal with is only valuable in the narrow context of family, friends, or colleagues. Other media relates to particular personal or professional interests/concerns. Still more is of a broader cultural but short term value, like daily news. Only a relatively small portion of information we deal with is valuable in a broad, cultural context and reasonably long-term. It's this last type of knowledge that is really at stake in this debate at Britannica. And while it's nice to be able to look up what meerkats eat when my daughter asks me (they're mostly insectivores, btw), that type of knowledge is not useful in my finding out what I need to buy at the store or where I can get the cheapest flight to my next conference or even what books I might want to consider ordering for my courses next semester.