Data Determinism

[Note: this is a post from a now defunct blog. I'm republishing it because of this recent article about Google, "Google designer leaves, blaming data-centrism". It is not a defense of what appears to be Google's data fetishism (but who can blame them?); it just got me thinkin' ...]

I want to say that the usual practice of beginning with the user interface, as the artifact that guides the conversation between clients and developers, is wrong. It looks good and sounds right: The client will be using the interface, right? The code is a black box that ought to be subject to intense refactoring, right?

True all, but we also know that the stack of application development rests on the database layer, moves into the various layers of code and so-called business logic, and ends with the user interface. The layer that has the most effect on what is possible to code or display downstream is the database layer. That is, what you choose as a database format and model will constrain what you can do on the presentation end, whereas presentation technologies rarely have effects in the opposite direction (a possible exception is Flash before Flex). This stack holds even if you’re not using MVC; it’s more or less encoded in the way our current software tools work. For example, even if you code in pure JavaScript, your stack is going to begin with JSON or XML or the DOM, and end with CSS.

Call this view “data determinism.” As such, it probably suffers from the same criticisms that have been leveled at other forms of determinism, such as historical materialism, which holds that infrastructre (work behaviors, technologies, etc.) determine superstructire (religious beliefs, laws, etc.). I’ll accept that, if you (the critic) accept that the data level at least constrains the other levels, and that the other levels, to have an effect, must be able to modify the data level. Well, then, there’s the rub: once the data model is written, it doesn’t get changed a whole lot. The web designers don’t have a lot to talk to the DBAs about, and the two groups rarely know how to have a conversation. In fact, with enterprise databases, you get the tail-wagging-the-dog effect: “We can’t do that because the database only accepts this kind of data.” So there.

Anyway, I believe that the conversation with clients should begin with the data model, using perhaps simplified E-R diagrams, but ultimately getting at a kind of ontology. What are the salient categories and relations and processes that describe the domain in question? This is a conversation that clients can have with developers, and usually it is a great conversation, and not constrained by an arbitrary visual artifact that can direct conversation along a false groove.

A couple of principles follow from data determinism:

1. The requirements process should be preceded (replaced?) by an ontology-discovery process. And the proper method to use here is ethnography.
2. The database should be designed with flexibility in mind. I prefer very simple semantic web structures (triples, graphs, etc.) that can be filtered by more specific ontology layers. This process I want to discuss in another post or two.
3. After this is in place, then the discussion should move to the level of visual artifacts, such as interfaces. Both the client and developer will have a better idea of what is possible.

This is essentially a codification of the application development process I’ve developed with clients in academia, where I have developed several web-based applications for humanities computing projects.

Looking back at this post, I see that it has significance for two things that currently occupy my mind: Edpunk and the RAW DATA NOW movement (both, interestingly, represented by folks at UMW …)

1. Data determinism provides an under-the-hood rationale for Edupunk: Enterprise apps tend to hide data and the database, reifying it into a natural, immutable condition that interfaces and behaviors have to conform to. Think of Blackboard. Also consider that it was over the data model that they took Desire2learn to court.

2. Data deteminism also helps explain why data, among all the things we call “information,” needs to be free (in spite of the fact that it apparently does not want to be). RAW DATA NOW, as Tim Berners-Lee recently exhorted the auidence at TED. Because if it determines everything, we need to have access to it — raw, and without undue mediation by nice-looking interfaces or toothy EULAs.

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Edupunk, Technology, and Leadership

I want to give my two cents on Edupunk, a wildy successful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Washington) to describe a style of academic technology support that (1) eschews Central IT and its dependency on scalable but clunky and ultimately boring and possibly evil applications, such as Blackboard, and (2) instead favors helping faculty use more open, flexible, elegant, interesting, and available technologies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as WordPress. In coining the term, Jim gave meaning and focus to a real trend and tension that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncatalyzed for being unnamed. Naming is powerful magic and we would do well to pay attention to it when it succeeds as well as it has in this case.

A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it connotes. In addition to the press that followed the coining of the term (including the New York Times), Jim has produced a playful but serious Battle Royale video series in which Jim and his former colleague Gardner Campbell (now at Baylor) debate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the term to advance goals they both share. (The topic was also the subject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not listened to that yet.) After listening to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the considerable semantic load of the term “punk,” for better and for worse. So I thought I would take a stab at rescuing the idea from the word, if that’s at all possible. (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.) Not that the debate between Gardner and Jim is reducible to mere semantics; they do have important differences of opinion on educational technology that go beyond the debate in question.

So, the core meaning of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straighforward analogy Jim draws between this style of academic technology and the late 1970s punk movement in music associated with groups like the Clash (his example). Just as the Clash had a raw freshness and energy in contrast to the bloated, formulaic, and empty music of Billboard 100 bands at the time, apps like WordPress and Drupal stand in contrast to the bloated and mind-numbing software that we often (but not always) get from the corporate sector, at least in the case of educational technology. The analogy works at a literal level since the success of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoidance of Big Music production studios and producers in favor of cheaper technologies in available spaces like garages and basements. [Update: garage music is an example of the long tail of production being enabled by the commodification of the means of music production that took place in the 1970s.]

When you look at the analogy in this way, the term garage band, or some variant of it, turns out to be a better analogy than punk proper for what Jim is getting at. As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.” The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Modern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoiding analogies to bands like the Sex Pistols, who were cynically manufactured and marketed from the start. I have a hard time thinking of Drupal, for example, in the same space as the Sex Pistols. I have a less hard time comparing the software to the sound of, say, Joy Division. There is an elegant simplicity to both that, presumably, derives from their being developed without the encumbrances of a beauracracy and Big Leadership.

The analogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gardner Campbell’s apt criticism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divisive and cyncial movement without any real concern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Generation), and therefore serves as a bad model for the hard work of crafting a transformational academic technology practice. But I suppose the norman “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coining the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.

And the word “punk” does have an important connection to the open source software culture that Jim valorizes: there is a direct bloodline of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyberpunk (literature) to the hackerdom (technology) that produced Perl, Linux, and PHP. It’s a connection that is evident from the aesthetics of open source software before it became successful and co-opted (not necessarily for worse) by the web-inflated software industry. Just look at the covers ot 2600 and The Perl Journal from 1990s.

So, although I think Gardner is correct about not wanting to salute this particular flag because of its guilt by association with the Johnny Rotten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto something very important that needs further unpacking, even after the hype curve subsides. Ironically, I think the set of issues he catalyzed with the term have precisely to do with leadership and its connection to teaching and technology, where Gardner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, teching and learning, theory | 6 Comments »

Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field

My previous musings on the opposition between McLuhan and Aristotle imply a two-dimensional continuum for locating various forms of media. If we let the term “narrative” cover what Butcher translates as “plot” in Aristotle, and we classify the four kinds of media discussed by Manovich, then he have the following structural table:

This table is an example of the classic structuralist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all possible variations of an opposition are laid out in a kind of truth table. A plus sign (+) means that the category is present in the item, while a minus sign (-) indicates its absence. These tables are useful for generating ideas about how elements in a given field — in this case, media forms — are related to each other, generating further questions. For example, it emerges that databases are the strong opposite of films, while stories and games are weak opposites.

The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimensional field, where the named column headers become the X and Y axes of a discrete Cartesian plane, and the values in the first column become values in the field. This is the sort of device made famous by Bourdieu (see Distinction). The advantage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more precision. Here’s what I have in mind:

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, classics, digital scholarship, theory | 6 Comments »

Aristotle and McLuhan (iii)

It came to me recently how completely and diametrically opposed Aristotle and McLuhan really are. By which I mean the ancient academic sensibility that still pervades academia and the (post)modern, new media one that wants to break free from the old forms associated with literacy.

In the Poetics Aristotle specifies two distinguishing features of tragic poetry: (1) the paramount importance of the plot, or sequencing of events in the play, and (2) the downgrading of the “spectacle” of the play — the scenery, special effects, etc. Here’s how he puts it (emphases mine):

The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.

So, the plot is the soul of tragedy while spectacle is the least artistic part of it. Spectacle is so low in Aristotle’s reckoning that he even suggests that drama doesn’t need actors and stages! Apparently, the script by itself will do fine to achieve the sublime effects of the art. (Here it is clear that what Aristotle means by poetry is writing, and that he strongly values the stand-alone written work of art with this hierarchy. Although the form of the novel emerges much later, it is hard not to notice a genealogical connection here.)

Notice how opposite this is of the new media. On the one hand, as McLuhan states over and over, the medium is the message — i.e. that spectacle is the most important dimension of art and communication. And, regarding plot, consider Lev Manovich’s idea that the database is the symbolic form of our time: the sortable, selectable, random-access, paradigmatic, and non-linear form of the database, broadly defined, is the precise opposite of writing, although both involve text. For writing is, above all, the construction of a specific and unique sequence of sentences into a work that has, the more artistic it is, what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Writing, in the sense of literary or philosophical or historical representation, is distinguished by the presense of an argument, a narrative, an unfolding of events and ideas in time, where the progression itself is as important as the content. Not so with databases, where content is decomposed into elemental units (records and fields) and then subject to endless growth and manipulation.

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, Uncategorized, classics, theory | 3 Comments »

Aristotle and McLuhan

Does McLuhan get us beyond Aristotle?

Just the other day I was re-reading my copy of Aristotle’s Poetics (tr. Butcher), and it struck me how interesting it might be to juxtapose Aristotle to McLuhan. They intersect at a lot of points. They are both media theorists-in fact, with the Poetics, Aristotle invents the field-but Aristotle is McLuhan’s opposite in that he is the first to theorize (and embrace) writing as a medium. But Aristotle also provides a supplement to McLuhan, since he unpacks the concept of drama that McLuhan draws on so heavily in his characterization of the new media. (For McLuhan, new media create an electric environment which serves as a global mise en scène for a postmodern drama of social life.) In addition, Aristotle sets a bar for McLuhan — for until the latter, or rather new media theorists who follow him, can provide an alternative to the concept of mimesis — with something more useful than Sonntag’s “erotics of art” (which admittedly sounds pretty fun) — then we will remain Aristotelians, for better or for worse. It is not enough to view mimesis as an artifact of writing, for that is a statement of faith and begs the question. A truly radical media theory would find the means to displace this concept, or else embrace it with abandon.

The art “without a name”

If there is any doubt that Aristotle is the first to embrace writing as a medium, and to dismiss Socrates’ concerns about it in the Phaedrus, check out this passage, which occurs at the end of Section I:

There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse—which verse, again, may either combine different meters or consist of but one kind—but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all meters, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of meters of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet [emphases mine].

Here Aristotle carves out a space for this new craft, writing, “under the general term poet.” The Poetics is about this new form of mimetic practice, this new medium, with particular emphasis not on the spectacle - McLuhan’s focus — but on the action, the arrangement of scenes … the screenplay.

The Spectacle of McLuhan

Here is what Aristotle has to say about the spectacle (the massage) of drama, one of the distinctive features he discerns in the art:

The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.

So we have a very thick line drawn in the sand. It’s not Gutenberg that created the old world that McLuhan wants to transform, it is Aristotle.

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Tech, People, Capital

Jim Groom writes another excellent piece in his blog, Bavatuesdays. In the post he makes the very important point that edutech poeple need to be aware, constantly aware, of the fact that technology, especially educational technology products like Blackboard, are bound up with corporate interests that are not our own. That technology does not always have the interest of teaching and learning to heart. I would add two things to this.

First, it’s not just corporations and capitalism that we need to be wary of, it’s governments too. Power is power, and educational technology can be the handmaiden of any institution willing to control it. What freaks me out about Blackboard most — and Angel too for that matter — is the way in which they push the assessment angle. In these systems the course becomes a conduit of information from the pedagogic periphery to the administrative core (and not between professor and student, the core relation). At some point, grade books — proffered as a convenience — will eventually frame how courses are taught and students graded, as they morph into devices for projecting standards and guidelines for teaching. The tail wags the dog.

Second, it’s not just Blackboard, but Web 2.0 as well. Facebook, for example, is about generating consumer data. It’s not, at root, about friends. So is Google. They’ve connected the web, but they’ve also helped transform the academic internet into a corporate web. The web is essentially a vast market mechanism which is quickly transforming and replacing the old, currency-based “system of the world” (if it has not done so already. The fact that banks and car makers are collapsing perhaps signifies this shift.) At least Blackboard is a knowable enemy, and therefore manageable to some extent. With Web 2.0, we have entered a matrix of surveillance the likes of which no dystopian novel I have read anticipated, since it is a matrix that we voluntary participate in. The degree of trust that we have given over to the web is amazing.

This is why I think edutech needs to do two things. We need to activate faculty as critics of technology, not simply users. By critic I mean one who understands technology for what it is, a cultural form with cognitive, pedagogical and social consequences, for good and for bad, and not merely a convenience. This is an important dimension of media fluency. And we need to encourage the development of what I call academia’s “indigenous” technologies, the true source of open source. Academia created contributed heavily to the creation of the internet and the web, and we have traditions of digital scholarship and e-science that provide alteranate frameworks for doing edutech than the Web 2.0 world of tags, life streaming, and network effects. These things are great — I am for them — but they can’t be our refuge from Blackboard.

Posted in Edupunk Reading Group, digital scholarship, open source scholarship, theory | 2 Comments »

McLuhan for Edupunks

[NOTE: This text has been reformatted to fit your screen ... which is to say, I've made some changes to make it less an essay and more a blog entry. I'm still getting a feel for the genre.]

Quick note on what I’m trying to do by “reading McLuhan”

For me, a close reading is an excavation of a text, the retrieval of embedded symbols and meanings indicated by the circuitry of tropes and figures chosen and adapted by the author, provided by tradition, and selected for by reception. I try to discover the recurring images, the symbolic structures, deployed in a text that structure and ground its argument.

Symbolic structures are important, in my view, because they are generative forms that produce the complex discursive forms that we call texts, just as genes generate proteins. “The symbol gives rise to thought,” says Ricoeur—a close reading attempts to reverse engineer this process.

A close reading of McLuhan’s Massage is interesting because the book is a kind of post-text, a self-consciously post-literate construct that adopts what were then the new media forms of advertising (although even these date back to the propaganda forms of the earlier 20th century). A distinctive feature of this kind of text is the use of real images (particularly Life magazine style photos), which makes the task of excavating imagery interesting—how is this excavation, when the artifacts are just lying on the ground? But the task is the same—literal images in the text are not used to represent so much as to provide second-order significations—it is not the referent of the photo that matters, but the grainy, black-and-white form of the signifier that counts, the intimation of hard, photo-journalistic realism. The medium is the message in this sense too.

What is interesting about texts that deploy both prose and imagery is how rarely the two channels merely parallel each other. The images in Medieval illuminated manuscripts will often tell a different, complementary tale than that contained in the writing. This is not the cognitive style of PowerPoint, where the on-screen image is often a redundant representation of the speaker’s words (or, all too often, vice versa). Similarly, McLuhan’s images do not represent the embedded imagery in the written channel.

McLuhan’s deep images are actually quite simple, stable, and powerfully generative. But they are not necessarily the ones we associate with his strongest memes — such as “media are extensions of man,” and, of course, “the medium is the message.” A close reading shows a relatively simple cluster of images of which McLuhan’s memetic one-liners are indices. Their role is to entice you, by hyperbole and paradox, into grasping his symbolically structured conceptual frame, his ontology. Here, then, is a small inventory of these images.

A. Electric (not electronic)

New media for McLuhan are primarily electric. His prose is littered with the term. He writes of “an electric information environment,” “an environment of instant electric speeds.” Examples of electric media are film. telephones, television, and the assemblage of media associated with the music industry — records, “hi-fi” and stereo music systems, radio, electric guitars, rock concert sound and light equipment, etc.

Significantly, McLuhan does not often use the word “electronic,” and when he does, his intent changes, as we shall see below. He was criticized for confusing the two terms, but I think his usage is accurate. For better or for worse, McLuhan does not theorize the digital qua digital very well. He does not theorize the effects of discrete representation—if he did he would find Gutenberg lurking beneath the surface of the effects he describes in the form of the command line (another rich image (not his) to be explored at another time). He is much better at describing the social effects of the pervasive, pulsing, and fast electric world of in-your-face media that characterizes advertising and rock-and-roll (which becomes another of advertising’s many vehicles):

The world pool of information fathered by electric media—movies, Telstar, flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear.

Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men …

B. Environments

Electric media are so powerful for McLuhan that they form an environment—a constructed, material space in which human action is situated and bound. McLuhan links new media so closely to environment that it seems clear that he is more interested in media as art and architecture than as means of information delivery. As art and architecture, new media comprise the aesthetic environment of the mass age, the human made forests of symbols that we call cities. (And this is consistent with the relative absence of the words electronic and digital in his prose. The electric is an interface as well as a visible motor; whereas the digital (at the time of his writing) is the hidden preserve of the numerati.)

It is easy to read in McLuhan a general theory of media that would associate all media with environments. But print media do not form an environment in the sense that electric media do, except for “book worms” — a telling image that reserves environmental immersion for the marginal, extreme case. Print media enforce a detachment from the bazaar into the cathedral. But electric media is a cheese that makes us all worms.

C. Bodies

Complementing McLuhan’s constant explicit references to environments are his implicit references to bodies, and media as “extensions of ourselves.” If media form an environment, that environment is largely comprised of the extended selves of others-in a literal sense, the bodies of others. With electric media, we are like giants on the world stage, bumping into each other, “working over” each other, massaging and seducing each other under the guise of communication and travel.

Two images in Massage illustrate this point, though implicitly. The first is the image of the large woman that you can walk inside of. Depicted to make a point about the role of art, the literal image illustrates the implicit image in the text quite well. With the new media, we (or at least some of us) have the power to become big bodies that others can inhabit.

The second is the image of the concert. Again, it is not explicit, but evoked. Reference to rock and roll conjures up the Oz-like image of a band on a stage—the Beatles at Shea stadium—larger than life, plugged into a sound apparatus that projects the guitar (itself an extension). Think of Jagger in his Jumpin’ Jack Flash phase, and the huge inflatable penis on stage.

D. Ritual and myth

The image of the concert connects to another of McLuhan’s deep image—ritual. The electric environment of new media creates forms of social participation that are constantly described in terms of ritual, drama, and mystic participation. McLuhan describes new media as “the total electric drama” and frequently refers to images of tribal interaction and myth: “Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension” he tells us, and “the Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age.”

Perhaps the single most important assertion in McLuhan’s symbolic armature is his depiction of the ritual quality of the electric environment as a liminal space, a place where boundaries of space, time, and social class are obviated and transcended. To draw out the symbolism a bit, as virtual, electric bodies, we constantly run into each other, intersect and interpenetrate, not necessarily in any sensual way (although it is hard to avoid that image), but as immaterial holographic projections who have not yet learned how to behave on this virtual stage. For now, it is a free-for-all of electric interaction, like the streets of Chiba City in Gibson’s Neuromancer.

According to the anthropologist Victor Turner, liminality is characterized by communitas—a short-lived state of fellow-feeling that many societies intentionally create from time to time in order to regenerate the social order (such Christmas or the Swazi rite of ncwala). McLuhan’s words are textbook descriptions of the limnal state (emphases mine):

Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement …

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another …

In McLuhan’s time, communitas was really achieved by events such as Woodstock, and it seems clear that the actual ritual form that McLuhan is referring to is the rock concert—a relatively new cultural form at the time—especially given his (surprisingly understated) references to Warhol, Dylan, and the Beatles.

E. Tribe, community, village

Constant reference to images of tribal ritual indicates McLuhan’s endgame—that electric media, in what must count as one of the most counter-intuitive unintended consequences of the century, are not alienating and disempowering, as Orwell depicted in novels such as 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but generative of authentic community in opposition to alienating mass society. By making us giants on the world stage, the new media have created a global village, our best hope to achieve Tonnie’s gemeinschaft. The old culture, associated with print and bureaucracy, can only reproduce gesellschaft, the oppressive square world of establishment society.

So new media create a ritualistic electric environment capable of engendering a return to human community; it can be a cure to the problem of “man against mass society.” So why does society continue to be oppressive?

F. Information

The global village is an ideal for McLuhan, not a realized situation. Tyranny remains in the form of information devices, or computers (emphases mine again):

Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.

The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions— the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.”

Here we see why McLuhan implicitly separates the electric from the electronic: the latter is associated with what can only be called a dark side of new media for McLuhan, the persistence of hierarchical, class-ridden societas in the forms of databases and surveillance. And this is consistent with his characterization of print culture-information technologies are the inheritors of print literacy, maximizing the effects of the ditto device to unprecedented degrees. I am not sure if McLuhan ever comes out an makes this opposition clear (between electric media and electronic information), but it seems clear enough from his ontology.

The implication of this opposition is, I think, profound: it means that McLuhan is not opposed to the loss of privacy. Note that it is not Big Brother who wants to know, it is “the community.” And his reference to gossip-the quintessential mechanism of social control in villages and small towns-must be viewed in light of his commitments to a tribal, ritualized sociality. As any anthropologist who has done fieldwork in a small, remote, non-literate setting will tell you, privacy does not exist in those worlds. McLuhan knows this, and he implies strongly that for our global village to emerge, we need to lose our old notions of privacy, and become devoted to service and collaboration:

Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and “human” service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty.

G. Old and New

So, the media transgress social boundaries of nation and property, threatening privacy, sovereignty, and class. This is the most profound message McLuhan has to offer — new media have returned us to a mythic, ritual consciousness, or at least they have the power to do so. But accepting this means getting over privacy concerns and other “hang-ups.”

Now, this is (finally) where McLuhan’s media determinism comes into play. The problem that we should concern ourselves with is not our loss of privacy, but our being caught between two worlds, two regimes of media. Our value of privacy is just a carry over from the print world of class separations and hierarchical organizations. Our problem is that print culture persists and continues to hold back the emergence of community:

The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions.

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on.

Some conclusions and questions

OK, then, these are some of the images that can be retrieved from McLuhan’s text, and I’ve tried to set them out in a kind of logical progression. Electric media have created a world of extended bodies and transgressive environments that have the capacity to destroy social boundaries and create a global village of ritual communitas. However, print culture persists in the form of information technology (e.g. databases) as well as the inertia of old forms trying to contain new content. If we want to realize the vision of a global village, we need to embrace the collaborative and ritualistic affordances of the new media, and oppose the centralizing, classifying, and hierarchical influence of the electronic.

Having written this, it strikes me as incomplete (of course it should be!), but I think it works as an ontology, or world picture, that persists to this day in, say, Michael Wesch, whose Spaceship Earth narrative (from Buckminster Fuller) is very close to McLuhan’s global vilage. For him the classroom is the agent of persistent print culture, and new media provide a means of engaging students in participatory culture. And I can even see viewing Lyotard in this framework, his agonistic language games being one of the devices of playing with new media to oppose the effects of computerization on knowledge and society.

If I were to summarize the view, I’d call it the Truman Show model of social life. For it is hard to escape the importance of literacy in the model, and the futility of countering it with ritual and play. Literacy (in the form of code and the command line, in addition to books and ledgers) remains the dominant media form of the world’s elite strata, whereas new media continues to play the role propaganda tool. Behind the Sex Pistols is EMI. It’s for another post, but I think we should be concerned with appropriating the informational (in this ontology).

But what about YouTube and the balancing of influence between media elites and commoners afforded by Web 2.0 and prosumption? Aren’t the mainstream media declining as more egalitarian social networks are emerging? Didn’t blogs kill Dan Rather? I think this is the exception that proves my reading: McLuhan does not provide us with the tools to theorize the effects of the new social media, since he separates the electric from the electronic, media from information. The cool thing about the new new media is the convergence of these. But I would suggest we start paying attention to the algorthms behind the services, to what I call the datasphere, and not take the outward purposes of Google and Facebook for granted. Facebook is primarily an engine of capital and a consumer research tool, not a community building tool. It’s hard to image a global coomunity in McLuhan’s sense ever emerging from it.

OK, nuff said for now.

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“Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world”

In a recent message to the Humanist listserv, Willard McCarty directs our attention to these remarks from Peter Sloterdijk’s essay, “The Operable Man: On the Ethical State of Gene Technology” (emphasis mine)”

In the current state of the world, the single most striking feature of intellectual and technological history that is that technological culture is producing a new state of language and writing. This new state has hardly anything in common anymore with traditional interpretations of language and writing by religion, metaphysics and humanism. The old House of Being turns out to be something wherein a residence in the sense of dwelling and of the bringing close of the distant is hardly possible any longer. Speaking and writing in the age of digital codes and genetic transcriptions no longer make any kind of familiar sense; the typefaces of technology are developing apart from transmission, and no longer evoke homeliness or the effects of befriending the external. On the contrary, they increase the scope of the external and that which can never be assimilated. The province of language is shrinking, while the sector of straight-forward text is growing. Heidegger, in his letter “On Humanism,” expressed these problems in an old-fashioned, yet factually correct manner, when he called homelessness the outstanding ontological feature of man’s contemporary modus essendi.

Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world. Hence it is necessary to think that destiny in terms of the history of Being … Technology is in its essence a destiny within the history of Being … As a form of truth technology is grounded in the history of metaphysics.”

This makes a great deal of sense to me. The idea of homelessness (alienation, really) describes the combined effects of the non-linearity of the database as symbolic form (Manovich) on cognition and the translocatedness introduced by life in the cloud on sociality. The two forces reinforce each other: as the web/cloud becomes more pervasive and invasive by the multiplication and miniaturization of innumerable personal devices, the form of the database is increasingly privileged as the dominant medium of knowledge formation and acquisition. Indeed, we, as members of the cloud (Wesch’s machine), actually become members of an actual, massive database — the social graph that connects us all in the web, and which Nick Carr rightly calls one big brain.

The role of the biological is also worth noting: in the form of genetics, biological images have served since the beginning of the cybernetic era (1950s) the role of naturalizing core symbol, legitimating the category of Information by both expressing and reinforcing the idea that knowledge consists essentially in strings of bits (like a ticker tape), with entropy serving as the core codec for how organisms communicate. This relationship has only gotten stronger with the rise of the web and the success of biological science and nanotechnology. (For more on the ideological connection between biology and information, see Kay’s Cybernetics, Information, Life: The Emergence of Scriptural Representations of Heredity for a critical genealogy, and Meyer and Davis’ It’s Alive! The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business for an unabashed attempt to monetize it.)

Ultimately, this technologically-driven Heideggerian homelessness raises questions about the validity of notions about community and sociality raised by Web 2.0 enthusiasts, especially those in the instructional technology sector. Is virtual community really community? Does it share, for example, any of the traits described by Tönnies’ notion of community (gemeinschaft)? Or is it community in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”? Not that the two are entirely antithetical — Anderson’s notion of national community is an interesting synthesis of the community and society set up by Tönnies. But if virtual community is the ideological inheritor of the imagined national community, what form of social and political organization does it relfect and reinforce? What is the habitat for this new habitus? Whatever it is, it has a lot to do with Google, it’s off-shore cities of data, and globalization.

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Gaming article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly

Just quick message to note that my article on gaming has been published in EDUCAUSE Quarterly. You can find it at the following URL:

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/OvercomingtheFearofGaming/47081

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Why games are different

I’m writing a paper on digital gaming, and had to lose one of those chunks of thought you produce in the process of writing, but which doesn’t belong in the final product. This seems like a good place to put it. The point of the paragraph is to contrast gaming with some other new media genres that have had more success being incorporated into teaching and learning.

Digital storytelling, podcasting, blogging, and collaborative writing with wikis each appear to be digital variants of traditional course materials and course work, with intelligible transition paths for incorporating them into the classroom. In each case, the focus is on creating content in more or less understood forms, new forms that are not foreign to traditional forms such as the expository essay, the academic journal article, the oral presentation, and the film. These new media genres differ from their traditional counterparts primarily in their inclusion of other media types (audio and video) or in the additional dimensions of collaborative authorship and public audiences. But they retain a traditional emphasis on being strongly discursive, and in retaining the academically important premises of linearity and textuality. By linearity, I do not mean simple adherence to a logical ordering of things, where one idea follows from the previous, but rather to a prescribed temporal order of presentation that often has what Frank Kermode called “the sense of an ending.” For example, although digital storytelling makes use of the channel of visual animation, its compelling feature for educational use is the subordination of this channel to the narrator’s voice and to the comfortable linearity of film. Wiki hypertext appears to be radically non-linear, but in its typical usage, what emerges are densely linked collections of traditional text. Wikipedia, for all of the stigma it carries among media traditionalists, is founded on very traditional notions of what counts as content. Blogs and podcasts are the most traditional of all, since they are variants of very traditional forms of written and oral discourse. Where these forms are revolutionary is in their modes of production and of distribution, and in the emergent structures of participation that result from these. But these dimensions are precisely what tend to be absent from their pedagogical deployment.

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