digital digs

digital ethics and scholarship: more on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

As mentioned in the previous post, some further thoughts on the recently released Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (free download). Admittedly, I am skipping around somewhat in the collection and writing today about two of the pieces in the final section on "Sustaining Scholarship and the Environment:" "Sustainable Digital Ecologies and Considered Limits" by Lisa Lebduska and "Sustaining Scholarly Efforts: The Challenge of Digital Media" by Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, and Patrick Berry. Clearly the notion of sustainability is at stake here. It's not only a question of can we build a lab, create a new course, start a new journal, or begin a new scholarly practice: it's a question of what does it take to keep such things alive. And I know from my own experience that bringing things like these to life in the first place can be such a difficult task that it is tempting to put off the question of long-term sustainability.

You might think that such a statement is a preamble to a warning about the danger of such an approach, and I suppose you can take it that way. However, anything short of legally-binding contractual commitments to sustainability (which you are not likely to get) are probably not worth much anyway. What I mean is that the bottom line to sustainability is access to material resources (money). There is really only one strategy for sustainability, as cynical as this may be: being successful in a way that can be communicated to, and valued by, the people who decide to give you money. In short, it is exactly the same strategy any professor employs in pursuit of access to that most important mechanism of sustainability: tenure.

Beyond that, I have never particularly felt the need to be an apologist or evangelist for digital media. Lebduska focuses part of her essay on the reasons why some faculty are skeptical or resistant toward new technology. In my view, some of these arguments are important and reasonable, some are poorly conceived, and others are just self-interested turf protection.

To put succinctly my own thoughts on this matter... if you have concerns about emerging technologies, that's fine, but for your concerns to have any merit in academic terms, they have to be based upon a disciplinary study of those technologies. In short, to have a legitimate academic concern regarding technology is probably as strong a reason for calling for studying these technologies as I can imagine. I mean, does it make any academic intellectual sense to say, "I think x is a matter of great concern for the future of our society, so it's my position that we should not study it."

In any case, in the big picture, 20 years down the line, one of three things will happen: most of the humanistic disciplines around today will be gone; most of the current humanities will have morphed into digital versions of themselves; or we will have reverted to print technologies and the humanities will remain largely unchanged. I wouldn't bet on the last one. What we do in the next decade might have an impact on which of the first two possibilities comes about. I suppose that is where this collection lies.

But I digress from my discussion of these essays!

In trying to move us forward, Selfe, Hawisher, and Berry identify three principles of feminist scholarship and sustainability:

Principle #1: The profession of English can retain its traditional value on scholarship that is original, innovative, intellectual and sustained, peer reviewed, and published, while acknowledging that scholarly fields, forms, and values change.

Principle #2: Scholarly models of production are not fixed. Rather, they are fluid, and socially and technologically shaped and contingent. Scholarship, increasingly, is created, maintained, and circulated in a range of electronic environments that can be used to extend the intellectual reach of ideas and the development of academic fields and subfields.

Principle #3: Social networks and collaborative scholarship—especially when informed by feminist values on sharing and connection—can multiply and leverage the innovation and contributions of new scholarly projects. They can also help increase the sustainability of such projects and the community at large.

This is certainly sound advice and, as the essay exemplifies, Selfe and Hawisher's careers as leaders in the field of computers and writing serve as evidence. I would expand upon this to note the importance of extending these networks beyond English, as organizations like HASTAC demonstrate. As reasonable as these principles sound, we know that strong objections remain to digital scholarship.

Lebduska invokes Lawrence Lessig's concept of rivalrous, non-rivalrous, and innovation commons in seeking to understand these objections. Though we can think of aspects of digital scholarship as falling into the non-rivalrous and innovations commons, along with other aspects of digital culture, inasmuch as digital scholarship draws on limited university resources, it is undoubtedly in competition with traditional practices, ranging from library budgets to hiring practices. It is perhaps not so easy to acknowledge that "scholarly fields, forms, and values change," even though change must be an integral part of any living, intellectual practice.

Setting aside the intellectual arguments, for those committed to traditional scholarly practices, for whatever reason, the primary advantages lie in inertia, bureaucracy, and the general conservatism of academic life (even if one doesn't otherwise share those values). For those interested in digital scholarship, the advantages lie in access to the nonrivalrous and innovation commons of digital culture, as well as all the external cultural forces that seek change in higher education (even if one doesn't otherwise agree with them). It does create strange bedfellows, where scholars who fought to open the literary canon now align themselves with the cultural conversative values that built that canon and scholars who critique corporate values find themselves in agreement on the importance of teaching "digital literacy" (or whatever you want to call it).

Taking the long view, the digitizing of the humanities seems inevitable, but it ain't going to be pretty. The only real, ethical question lies in what role one sees for oneself in the eventual shape those humanities take. The guidelines in these essays are not a bad place to start thinking about such things.

preliminary thoughts on Technological Ecologies and Sustainability

I've started read Technological Ecologies and Sustainability eds. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi A. McKee, and Dickie Selfe: the first book out of the Computers and Composition Digital Press (available here). This new press is an exciting proposition and it's great to see it come to life. Though I'm just getting into the text,  Technological Ecologies and Sustainability raises important new questions for us to consider. As the editors write in their introduction,

Why shouldn’t scholars and teachers of English studies once again envision a new institutional space for prioritizing propositions of compelling sustainable technological ecologies and establishing a temporary state of affairs? Why can we not imagine an institutional process that will eventually call that state of affairs into question, so that the process can begin again? We and our colleagues have brought to life unique and innovative institutional spaces before as we created (and continue to recreate) writing and learning centers or technology-rich labs and classrooms, as we create new techno-pedagogies out of each online space that leaps into existence (blogs, wikis, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.), and as we create new digital spaces for publishing online scholarly work. We are perfectly capable of creating institutional space for establishing temporary states of affairs on which we can base decisions in the service of sustainable technological ecologies. We are flexible and nimble enough to imagine policies and procedures that will, then, call a temporary state of affairs into question and begin Latour’s process all over again (collective gathering civil discussion  ranking of propositions  establishing yet another temporary state of affairs).

There's no doubt that we are in a challenging moment. It is nearly as difficult to figure out the questions that we need to ask as it is to seek answers to those questions. That process is not made any easier by the larger contexts of the economy and the changing nature of higher education (of which technological concerns are only one part). How should rhetoric and composition, or more broadly, English Studies, or even broader, the humanities, respond to the emerging practices of networked digital media? How should we approach the subject as researchers? How should we incorporate it into our curriculum? Into first-year writing? Into writing across the curriculum? Into undergrad and graduate degree programs?

Ideally the bottom line answer to these questions would begin with your degree of certainty in your understanding of where we will be in 2020. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone can have much certainty. As such it is imperative to move forward with a highly fluid and responsive set of tactics, which is something I see echoed in this collection.  The couple chapters I've already read all suggest that these tactics are heavily shaped by local, institutional forces. This is something I've suggested myself (so naturally I think it is a very astute observation ;-) ). That said, at some point, our disciplinary identity might shift so that the integration of new media would seem as normal as the integration of print texts, and then differences between local contexts will likely diminish as they have in terms of the expectations for English faculty in terms of books have. But that is quite a ways off, if it ever arrives.

In the first essay in the collection, Rylish Moeller, Cheryl Ball, and Kellie Cargile Cook, take up the question of tactics from the perspective of new faculty entering an institution. Specifically, the article recounts Rylish and Cheryl's experiences joining the Utah State faculty. As they argue,

One solution to this issue is to look at new English faculty as agents who manipulate certain pressure points at various times within a complex, political economic ecology—a social system demonstrated through material, measurable effects and affectations. These pressure points become more visible with the introduction of new agents and new technologies, both of which push the boundaries of a department’s constraints. 

This is an interesting perspective for me as I move to join the Buffalo faculty next semester. I think this is a useful essay for anyone in computers and writing entering a new position, or indeed any department hiring such faculty. Looking at the particular experiences of these faculty will likely give many readers new insight into what happens when digital media faculty are brought into a department. My own experiences at Cortland were not much different. At first I was given an office computer that was of little use to me. And it took a couple years to build a computer lab where I could teach my courses. The successes I did enjoy at Cortland came from building relationships with faculty and staff across the campus. This also seems to have been the experience at Utah State. It's really not surprising. And in the end, we might take comfort in recognizing the importance of good old-fashioned rhetoric and communication to these efforts.

In the end, it's not really anything new to reshape a department through new hires, but the move toward digital media takes this in a new direction. That is, making a move toward hiring faculty in a new literary specialization will make a difference internally to a department, but hiring digital media faculty changes the department's relationship to the material operation of a campus. Digital media faculty will establish connections and draw on resources that traditional literary faculty might never consider. For good or for bad, we shake things up.

So that's certainly one way to call the current state of affairs into question.

I'm looking forward to reading further into this collection.

reading is dead; long live reading

Steven Johnson writes for the Wall Street Journal on "How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write." Nick Carbone posts about this to the WPA list and a brief but instructive discussion ensues, particularly over this passage from Johnson about putting books online.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

What is seemingly lost here is that familiar, media-ideological experience of "intimacy" between the author and the reader. It is an intimacy that Kittler describes when observes that before the development of mechanical media, "handwriting alone could guarantee the perfect securing of traces... And what applied to writing also applied to reading. Even if the alphabetized individual known as the 'author' finally had to fall from the private exteriority of handwriting into the anonymous exteriority of print in order to secure 'all that's left of him, as well as his self-propagation'--alphabetized individuals known as 'readers' were able to reverse this exteriorization."

Perhaps it is too much to say, as Johnson does, that "Nobody will read alone anymore," except in the sense that no one has ever read alone, that reading has always been a social/cultural activity, that in order "to be a reader" one must enter into an ideological relationship with a text. At the same time, I think Johnson has a good point in suggesting that the user experience of the book has been forever changed by one's encounter with networks. Even if the words on a page are not literally linked, we can turn them into points of conduction with the flick of a Google search. In six months maybe you will be reading Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter. You will read the passage I quoted above. Perhaps it will spark a brief flicker in your memory, leading you to type the phrase into Google. And maybe this post comes up. Who knows? But something will come up.

But of course no one really worries about such things for theory or scholarship or even most nonfiction. We all seem to realize that such texts are about community conversations. But somehow with novels, and maybe creative nonfiction, we fantisize a more intimate relationship. In some respects the novel is founded on this fantasy. We imagine intimate relationships with the author's mind, with the fictional minds of the characters. Is this something we will no longer imagine? Perhaps it will be as Ulmer suggests when he writes that "the ethical dilemma of self/other will not be solved in an electronic apparatus but simply that it will become irrelevant, just as 'appeasing' the gods, which was the problem addressed by ritual, became irrelevant in literacy, even if ritual form--in theater--continued within literacy."

So we will continue to read (of course!) but for different reasons. Just as we do not lament the loss of the desire to appease the gods, we will (eventually) not lament the loss of the desire for this intimate encounter with the author.

In the end it is certainly more complicated than all of that (as it always is). Perhaps we read novels for an intimate experience, but we also read them to be part of a literate club, to reaffirm some social/intellectual identity. Sometimes the latter desire may be more in force than the former. But if we come to see ourselves as part of a network then perhaps we cease to worry so much about the self/other boundary and the desire for the intimate experience with an other fades.

anathem and the consolation of rhet/comp

With the semester over, I finally got the opportunity to read Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If you like Stephenson's work, particularly his more recent work, I think you will enjoy this novel. It is science fiction, but it often reads more like a Platonic dialogue with extensive philosphical conversations about time, space, and consciousness, generally articulated in mathematical terms. The novel is also interesting for its alternate world take on academia. In this world, the work of intellectuals is carried out by monks, male and female, who live a seriously cloistered life. There are different orders. Some get to come out once a year (these are mostly students). Then there are those who are in for a decade, a century, and a millenium (yes, the last one is a bit of a mystery revealed through the narrative). The novel describes how the average folks, the extramuros, are not interested in the abstractions or even the complex technologies developed inside. As is articulated a couple times in the novel, some people burn with the curiousity to understand, to seek out the secrets of the world. Most people, however, have no such interests and are satisfied with pursuing more immediate desires.

Anyway, the novel resonated well with the In Our Time podcast I heard the other day. It was nominally on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy but was really a broader conversation about philsophy ranging from Plato to Camus (just about as far as one can go actually).Generally speaking, Boethius is a neo-Platonist who articualtes the Platonic ideal in Christian terms. The book is written while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting execution and essentially explores the solace or consolation philosophy might offer one in such a position. Anathem pulls out a similar discussion with different orders of monks. Some believe in an essentially Platonic notion of a higher plane of ideal forms. Some might even attribute a divine quality to this world, in neo-Platonist fashion. Still others, who are termed Rhetors, view knowledge and truth as discursive and culturally constructed. Classically, we know that philosophy and rhetoric can be opposed, so all this got me wondering what the "consolation of rhetoric" might be.

Of course, when I hear the world consolation my mind leaps to consolation prize. FYC is often viewed as a kind of consolation prize... not as one's first choice. Philosophy is perhaps also a consolation prize, given to those who cannot find happiness in ignorance.

But as the In Our Time discussion addressed, philosophy need not (or in some view should not) be simply an abstract way to relieve sorrow. Philosophy becomes a means for engaging in the world. If, from a Camus-like, existentialist position, the world has no intrinsic meaning, then it falls upon the philosopher to produce value through action in response to one's cultural-historical conditions. In such conditions one can see the subordinate role the rhetoric has played since Plato in leading one's audience to the Truth or at least to a truth.

However I wonder if a different compositional consolation might not be available. Stephenson's novel speculates on the possibility of multiple universes, narrowly separated by quantum differences that lead us to spin off in slightly different directions. The characters speak of these as different narratives. I was thinking of choose-your-own-adventure or hyperfiction. The act of composition offers an affective encounter with this quantum-virtual-undecided experience. In the compositional event, many virtual possibilities exist. The potential for different worlds stand before us. Different verisions of ourselves stand before us. Yes, perhaps the differences are modest, but we encounter the potential for mutation.

Given the choice between the speculative contemplation of an ideal other world, the consolation of philosophy, and the meditative reflection on the virtual possibilities of the moment, the consolation of composition, I will take the latter. Of course no choice is necessary, so one might as well have both.

hunting and gathering in the digital age

I'm in the midst of reading Peter Morville's Ambient Findability. His discussion of the connections between the contemporary challenges of human information interaction (HII) and our paleolithic cognitive wetware, as articulated in evolutionary psychology and elsewhere, interests me and connects with some of the thoughts I've written here about paleorhetoric, as well as in The Two Virtuals.

Basically I understand Morville's point here to be this: our brains evolved to process information in the context of pre-historic hunting and gathering. Symbolic behavior came along later, piggybacking on this cognitive context.  This is sometimes called "information foraging" (Wikipedia).

This is a behavior that we are all familiar with, every time we make our way to the Google search box or find ourselves browsing. Perhaps we are looking for something specific that we've seen before (but forgot to bookmark). Maybe we're looking for some specific piece of information (e.g., how to cook wheat berries). Or maybe we are engaged in a less specific search: much like our foraging ancestors, we're just looking for something good to eat. How do we make our decisions? Are we regularly making rational choices along a decision tree that leads us ultimately to the best possible result?

Of course not. We're human. Post-human maybe in the sense that we don't (and never have) reflected historical notions of human-ness. But we are still human, still bodies. As Morville notes, "Since being happy broadens our thought processes and facilitates creative thinking, attractive products that make us happy can improve our ability to use them. In effect they work better because we work better. Small gifts (and flattery) can have similar positive effects. But why are we so susceptible to these superficial elements? How can such smart beings be so shallow?"

Those a good questions. My perspective comes from a different angle. I see this history of information interaction (going back to Aristotle) as operating on slowly developing ontologies and epistemologies, not to mention ethics! One result, as we all know, is that knowledge has been (is) viewed as fundamentally rational and organizable by rational means. The other result is that humans are capable of rational thought, that some portion of us (e.g. our souls) is purely rational, and that we should act rationally (that's where the ethical injunction appears).

As Morville notes, we are beginning to see ourselves in different, cognitive terms. In addition, I would add, we might begin to see information in different terms as well. It would not necessarily be to our benefit if we were strictly rational beings (if such beings are even possible, if rationality actually exists). Our feelings give us insights, as do our intuitions. We ought not to pretend we understand our wetware so very well.

So the question then becomes how to build information systems that better recognize our humanity. We see this (and fail to see this) in language all the time in its affective, supplemental force, beyond the "message." And the humanities as a constellation of disciplines is focused on such questions. It is in this arena that we have something to offer in understanding media, communications, and information.

Two Virtuals tag cloud

Inspired by Collin, I made this Wordle tag cloud of Two Virtuals.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and the power of radical transparency

Read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which is a NYT bestseller even though you can download it for free from his site. It's a Young Adult novel but it deals with some serious and interesting themes. Go out and read it. The novel is a powerful investigation of our civil rights in our "war on terror" and the role technology might play for good or bad. Along the way it provides a great history of civil disobedience and accessible explanations of surveillance and cryptology (and why you might care about such things). I'll be interested to see how HS teachers and schools respond to this YA novel. Doctorow provides usable instructions for circumventing existing school network security. Of course all that information is already available online but it's a little different when your teacher gives you the information, right?

So the book comes at you from two angles. First it deals with government brutality. Sadly it's not hard to imagine that if there were another terrorist attack of a similar magnitude to 9/11 that it could result in the abridgment of civil rights. It reminds us how important privacy is to freedom and how important encryption can be for privacy in the cognisphere. The second part, especially important for its teen audience, is seeing the role institutions play here. Maybe teens are all jaded and cynical, but not the ones I meet when they show up on campus. Doctorow shows students what we all know. Educational institutions present themselves as distributors of knowledge and information when it would be more accurate to understand them as guardians of knowledge and information.  There's a perpetual arms race between those who attempt to lock down networks in institutions and those who devise means to unlock them. Schools forbid cell phones, teachers keep computers turned off, professors tell students NOT to bring laptops to class: they don't do these things b/c they hope students will be able to access and communicate knowledge.

Anyway, that's all old stuff for us (though I think this novel is a great way to introduce these issues to teens, both in HS and college).

Importantly though, the other side of privacy is radical transparency. As Doctorow explains, the only kind of encryption that works is public encryption. Fortunately we don't live in a world like Little Brother in that Doctorow doesn't have to fear imprisonment for his novel or website. I'm presenting at Computers and Writing on open access pedagogy and will be talking about this. I don't teach in a public space because I have "nothing to hide." We all desire privacy. I operate in the open b/c it strengthens my teaching and scholarship. I mean here I am, 11 pm, having just finished this book, trying to figure out what I'm thinking right now.

(Perhaps such thoughts should be kept private, eh? Well I doubt anyone is forcing you to read this.)

The obvious part is that I can get feedback from others, and I won't ignore that b/c I really do value it. The second, maybe equally obvious part is the way that the demand to articulate my thoughts here pushes me. I can't just allow myself to settle for a thought resting in my mind.  However, openness has another important effect. It develops trust within a community.

Does this sound naive to you?

Think of it this way. In a department, all the profs have academic freedom. We teach how we want. It's unlikely that we share syllabi. Mine are available online at least during the semester in which I'm using them, but 90%+ of my colleagues are not. Our course evaluations are confidential (though rumors certainly circulate).

What does this accomplish? It often leads us sadly to imagine the worst of our colleagues. We operate in secret, insisting on our "freedom" to do so and the result is generally a broken community where our freedom manifest in our hiding in our classrooms and suspecting our colleagues of some unnamed infringement. Yep, I bet you always wondered what academic freedom was; well, now you know.

What would happen if it were all out in the open? I'm sure there would be some "discussion." But we'd all be swaying in the breeze, so to speak. In the long term, we'd have to learn to accept our differences. After all, we aren't going to dispense with academic freedom! Instead, we're actually going to use it to be public rather than private. The ultimate result of this transparency is a stronger privacy, a stronger, community-supported right to one's intellectual practices.

And that's what I think I get here. Not that everyone supports me of course. It'd be a pretty boring blog if everyone agreed with it. Hell, even I don't agree with everything I've written here over the years. That's not the point. Instead, I simply believe that by making public the things I'm thinking and doing as an academic, I strengthen the integrity of my everyday work, which by its nature often takes place in more private spaces.

when sorting things out is a bad thing

Richard Florida mentions Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort.  The essential premise of the book is that as America has become more diverse, Americans have sought out homogeneity by moving into communities with people more like themselves.

This reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Maybe this is just an understandable product of increased mobility. Maybe it's people giving up on democracy. I don't know. Given a choice, would you prefer to live in a community with people who generally share your values, interests, culture? I wonder if this isn't more broadly a product of the social, economic, technoscientific revolution in which we are immersed. We are really at sea about the political, social, and ethical responses we ought to make about such matters.

It is pure coincidence that the same thirty years has seen the ongoing balkanization of our discipline? How pathetic is it that when humanities are in decline and we struggle to make ourselves relevant to students and the general culture that we avoid one another? that we gather in separate intellectual enclaves rather than communicating?

I'm not suggesting that we have to agree or even really get along (heaven forbid!). But how about figuring out a way of living that does more than just hope the rest of the world doesn't exist or won't call.

liberal facism

Been on vacation a good long while. Felt good. I'm starting my sabbatical, so I need to get my brain turning again. So here I am.

I read the Salon interview with Jonah Goldberg about his book Liberal Fascism. I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. Maybe it is the partisan hatchet job people on the left seem to suggest it is. It does seem that we have gone well past the point where any serious political dialog can be had in this country. Maybe that's the clearest signal of fascism one could ever need...

Anyway, I am quite familiar with the idea of liberal fascism. Not surprisingly, my notions of fascism are heavily informed by Deleuze and Guattari, but a good succinct definition comes from Benjamin in his observation that fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics, as in life becomes lifestyle becomes lifestyle politics. Having spent my adult life on college campuses, having lived in Ithaca NY and spent time in New Age enclaves in the Southwest, I am quite familiar with lefty lifestyle politics and its micropolitical fascism. However, having grown up in suburban NJ and lived most of my life surrounded by churches, malls, and box stores, I am as familiar as most of us with the micropolitical fascism of the everyday American religious right.

By this definition of fascism, we are all inescapably fascist. In fact, we would look at WWII as the defeat of a nationalistic, eugenic, socialist form of fascism by a globalizing, technological, capitalistic form of fascism.

Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The next book I'm eager to read is Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Amazon). It's been getting a lot of attention. Time magazine has a piece this week proclaiming the novel as the next big thing. I've taught his short story collection Drown a number of times.

From the descriptions I've read, the new novel, like the short stories, has strong personal connections for Diaz. The Time article offers this brief character description from the novel:

"Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and who watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7, could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school."

The novel promises to take this idiosyncratic perspective (that is 100% Diaz) and use it as a launching point for a thorough examination of the processes of colonization and immigration. The book comes out Sept 6th, so I'll write more after then.