digital digs

mapping play

From Johndan I picked up on this interesting model of "play" (PDF) from the Dubberly Design Office. I'd stick the image up here but it is quite intricate and you'd really need to download the PDF to read it. We can think of maps in several ways. Conventionally, in the humanities, we might be suspicious of such conceptual mapping as over-simplification or rationally over-determined. Reasonable skepticism. And the easiest response might be to critique or simply to ignore. But I am more interested in how to turn this into something productive.

The questions, then, are what we do with this model and how we take up mapping practices in relation to it? Deleuze and Guattari write about maps and tracings: "What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification." Meanwhile the tracing "injects redundancies and propogates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or the rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration."

So what do we see when we look at this model?  We might begin with the spine of Context --> Play --> Act --> Conversation --> Shared World --> Engagement --> End (pause). The Derridean in us might begin by noticing how "Play" appears within the model, a mise en abyme I suppose. The model has an arboreal appearance, even as it includes several interlocking, recursive loops. However these loops turn out to be linked modular machines that can be removed. The "cycle of learning" for example, takes a turn at the end/pause mark and moves through a process of Benefit/Harm --> Experience --> Goals --> Assess --> Plan --> Act (where we reconnect with the spine). Interestingly here, the "learning cycle" routes us around "play."

How might we put play back on the map? First, we map this tracing as a fractal process, always between dimensions and never quite closing it's loop. The end/pause is more of a gap than a completion of a circuit or shape. Activity bifurcates here, heading both down the spine and through learning. Meanwhile we might insert this model in each point, just as play is inserted as a point with the model itself. That is, if we were to zoom in on any of the named impasses, might we not find the same model of play within it?

The cycle of continuous play: Act --> Observe --> Assess--> Plan

The cycle of fun: Act --> Conversation --> Shared World --> Engagement --> Fun --> Goals --> Assess --> Plan

More curious matters here. Again "Fun" occurs within the cycle of fun, but "Play" does not appear in the cycle of continuous play. Perhaps one might inclined to critique this as poor design. However I see these matters as fortuitous, if not intentional. Play continues iteratively, even as the other segments process play activity, but even then play persists (playfully?) beyond its own iterations. What is at stake here, and what undoes this tracing, throwing it back into the real, is the problem  of, what might iteratively be termed, "intention," "origin," or "the individual."

The individual appears on the model. The model notes

Play is a conversation, and conversations require participants—at least two individuals. An individual can be:

• a single person
• a group of people (a team)
• one of many perspectives within a single person
• a virtual person

Indeed. So an "individual" can be either/both a partial person, a "single" person, more than a "single" person, or not a person at all but rather something that is "virtually" a person. A curious but not disagreeable definition. These individuals are displayed as two icons of half-people or so. Their appendages point toward action. They have talking bubbles overlapping, Venn diagram-like, as conversation. And, most interestingly, overlapping thought bubbles of a "shared world." Is this ideology?

So again we have another curious mise en abyme. The entire "model of play" occurs in the interaction between two (or more or less) "individuals," while the individual also appears as a point in the model. As such it would appear to me that the model is less a tracing than it would appear at first. Though the diagram overdetermines certain patterns, underneath fractal connections keep frothing up.

Not sure what to do with it. Something to play with, I guess.

Blog personality test

Just for fun you can check out Typealyzer. Put in the URL for your blog and discover your blog's Myers-Briggs personality type. Mine was INTP- "The Thinkers," described as

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Hmmm.... I wonder how they got that from reading my blog? Actually I've done one of the free online Myers-Briggs tests in the past. I've actually got some slight variation in results but INTP has certainly come up.

teaching new media subjectivities

Michael Wesch offers a new article on Academic Commons "From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments." Wesch writes not only of the now familiar social media applications that are changing the contexts in which we teach but also of the institutional limitations that hamper our efforts to respond as educators to the cognisphere in which we now live. He also discusses the challenges of assessment that I want to return to in a later post. Here though I want to investigate two other points Wesch makes.

First, he remarks on the "crisis of significance" facing education. That is, "the fact that many students are now struggling to find meaning and significance in their education." There are so many problems here that go far beyond the issues of social media, though as Wesch notes, technology seems to intensify this problem. When students see no value in their education, they turn to their devices for distraction. So here are some thoughts about this:

• Is this a new crisis? Did students 20-30 years ago really think there was value in the lectures they attended? How about 50 years ago or a 100? I don't think we have any way of knowing the answer to this.
• How much of this is part of a larger cultural disconnect between academia and the broader range of cultures from which students now arrive?
• How do we address the serious cross-purposes of education vs. "job preparation" or whatever it is students think they want from college?

So I really see three issues there. First, there are some legitimate issues with educational practices in higher ed. Second, we need to address larger cultural attitudes toward education and intellectual life. Third, we need to do a better job of communicating to students what a college education is, how it works, and why it is valuable to them.

This leads to second point of Wesch's I want to speak to here. Wesch writes

I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.

This is something that has long been on the minds of rhet/comp pedagogues, particularly those who come from a cultural studies, post-process approach, and Wesch's own objectives in relation to student subjectivities echoes those of cultural studies.

If one thinks of subjectivity as a kind of interface, as I have written elsewhere, then the articulation of new subjectivities relates to the potential to connect in new ways with cognitive-media networks. And yes, it is about changing people, changing students, but that's what education has always been about. Wesch describes this as an "intellectual throw-down." I think of the experimental, mutative potential of media networks acting in compositional processes.

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.

being on time: kairotic microblogging

Plane travel and various appointments has me thinking about being "on time" quite a bit today, in the conventional sense. Then this morning I encountered so less conventional ways of thinking about the issue. As I've now made a regular practice, I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time," where this week's discussion was on the physics of time. I then attended a panel with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, John Jones, and Brian Croxall on microblogging.

One of the points discussed there, in a wide-ranging conversation, was that microblogging changes our relationship with time, the whole instantaneous nature of the tweet and (for the haters) the potential for a slavish dedication to daily minutiae. Bragg's guests were having a different conversation. There can be some question, in terms of physics, as to whether or not time exists as an independent phenomena. Newton imaging a divine clock ticking away outside the physical universe. From Einstein, as I understand it, we get the merging of space and time. Time is relative to things like position and speed. Then one can go further. Looking at sub-atomic particles it is possible to say that time doesn't really function as part of the equation of their behavior. One of the speakers made an analogy to temperature. Temperature is a measure of a system of molecules moving about. The more they move, the hotter they get. But if you look at just one molecule moving around, it doesn't make sense to say that it has a temperature. Time could be like that, an emergent quality of complex systems, like our consciousness for example.

During the Bragg conversation, there was much talk about stars and how when we look at starlight we are seeing events that happend millions and billions of years ago, depending on the distance of the star from earth. The same used to be true of human events. If something happened on the other side of the planet, it used to take weeks or months or years to reach you. Of course one can go back far enough to where such events never really reached you. If we understand time as wedded to space (a la Einstein) then we must say that such experiences of time are quite different from our own and that technology/networks have the power to reshape space-time.

This means a very different notion of being, I would suggest.

During the panel, there was talk of the danger and potential of mobs emerging from the political use of twitter. As we worked through that idea though, it seemed that perhaps the idea of the mob (smart or otherwise) is no longer entirely useful. I was thinking that twittering might be a spiky activity (a la Richard Florida) and that twittering is part of a new literacy that leads toward a new economic class, but it might likewise by that the idea of class is likewise troubled by the reformation of space-time. Perhaps this is like the "wranglers" Bruce Sterling suggests we will become in the age of the spime.

Regardless, it seems clear that time is not constant (I know for sure that the departure time of my plane is not constant!), but that I better be "on time" for my next appointment. And that means finishing up quickly here. It does seem to me though, that thinking about this reshaping of time is another way of getting at the cognisphere and "whatever" we may become.

not ready for spime-time pedagogy

I'm teaching Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things right now and thus thinking of his neologism, the spime. Spimes are Sterling's vision for the next generation of technology and draw their name from their unique ability to be precisely tracked in space and time. As Sterling suggests in his book (and here in a 2004 Wired article), we are already beginning to see spimes: objects that are linked to vast databases of information about them. He gives the example of how Amazon treats books. And I was thinking the other day of how I was in the supermarket trying to find an environmentally sound cleaning product. I was staring skeptically at Clorox's new line of green cleaning supplies. So I pulled out my iPhone and did an internet search. I was able to determine that these products were relatively good. So the product is there before me and the information is out there. The spime begins with linking those two. In addition, the spime also tracks its own singular history. That is, this particular bottle and its contents: where did they originate, where have they traveled, and how will they be disposed. Sterling suggests this kind of information will be significant in the necessary green revolution everyone speaks of.

But Sterling makes another interesting observation that appears tangential, but I believe is significant. In the Wired article he notes:

In July, Mexico's attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him, a bold bid to fight government corruption. Of course, it's his brain that makes him smart. It's the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time.

This reminded me of Baudrillard's arguments about the power of being an object, a somewhat counter-intuitive argument when we generally think of agency as attributable to subjects not objects. If we are indeed moving into a cultural period where we will begin to see intelligence, information, and power as emerging from objects or networks of objects, then I believe this has significance for how we understand our discipline (and I realize that in the scope of this revolution, this is a small corner, but it's my corner).

a pedagogy of planned emergence

Below Steven Johnson talks about emergence at TED in a presentation made in 2003 but made available on the TED site this month. His discussion touches on a number of things that were quite new in 2003--Technorati, the long tail--but are now familiar stuff. What's particularly interesting to me, however, is his approach toward emergence that looks at what might be termed a kind of human-scale feedback loop in emergent information systems.

What do I mean by that? Well Johnson starts by talking about city neighborhoods and asks, rhetorically, who plans a neighborhood? Traditionally the answer is that no one does, that neighborhoods emerge organically, and that attempts to simulate neighborhoods through planning often end up quite comic, as disneyfied versions of themselves. The organization of the web is likewise an organic process. For the most part, Google search ranks and the long tail linking/popularity pattern are not planned. Johnson ends his talk discussing Dave Sifry's efforts to shift the system somewhat and since then we have seen any number of attempts to game these search algorithms for monetary or political purposes.

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.

artilects and the new human

So I'm showing this video to my Cyberpunk Literature summer class. It's a BBC show dealing with cognitive science and developments of artificial intelligence. It looks at some particular activities and explores some of the ethical and political concerns around them.

It's an interesting video, and I think it will spur some good conversation with students. In particular I think it will connect well with Neuromancer and some of the other novels we're reading that address the idea of artificial intelligence. If anything, it's a good reminder that the questions explored by cyberpunk are still with us and are perhaps closer than ever.

packs roaming distributed learning environments

Read Gardner Campbell's recent post on Company Sense, by which he means a theatrical company or troupe and the type of relationships that can be built there. I've never been in a theater company, but I've been in a band and so I think I can understand the idea here of the kinds of connections and understandings that build between individuals through practice.

Also thinking about David Weinberger's thoughts about Anne Balsamo talking about her forthcoming book. All thinking in similar directions about "community," how we come together as producers and consumers of knowledge/media, as teachers and learners, as designers and users, etc: all of these dichotomies blending. There some particular binaries at work in these texts:

• Campbell critiques the distinction between hi-tech and hi-touch
• Balsamo calls upon C.P. Snow's two cultures and the use of collaboratories to move beyond them

Campbell speaks on how our notions of community rely upon direct communication, that the "hi-touch" relationship cannot survive the mediation by "hi-tech." This notion extends into learning communities. It is why we object to students with laptops in the classroom. It is what so many find difficult about the online course: building rapport with the students. This seems to run analogously to Snow's two cultures or at least as we have often characterized them. So if Balsamo calls for collaboration as a way of addressing technological challenges, Campbell remarks on the importance of developing particular affective relationships.

It's an old joke, but you could say that bands have their own version of Snow's two cultures: musicians and drummers. The point is that people with different perspectives, talents, and values elect to come together for a purpose... that's collaboration. And that they develop this "company sense" over time, through practice. Or they don't and they break up.

I approach this not in terms of companies or collaboratories but packs.