Category: New Media Seminar

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Old Meets New in the New Media Seminar

Despite the best efforts of a recalcitrant widget, a freshly pressed motherblog is just about ready for a new cohort of seminarians.  The New Media Seminar kicks off tomorrow, and while the syllabus addresses the “Awakening of the Digital Imagination” (i.e. the intellectual and cultural history of new media up to Web 2.0), the workings out and implications of that history in the twenty-first century will be front and center, especially as they relate to networked teaching and learning.  We are a talented group of faculty, staff and grad students representing fields as diverse as music, math, architecture and music,  as well as librarians, IT specialists, sociologists and computer scientists. And of course there are historians!

Many of us are also participating in the Connected Courses Initiative that is just getting underway across the country and here at VT, which enhances the possibilities for cross-fertilization of ideas and networks.  It’s should be a rewarding adventure,  and I am eager to begin.

And…I almost forgot – the newest part of this year’s seminar is The Learning Studio where we will meet. Picture an expertly equipped, almost infinitely flexible multi-media, networked space that facilitates collaboration, creativity, learning and listening  — sometimes all at once.  More about what’s happening there soon!

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Porcupine Condos

Bill Viola‘s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is one of the richest and most perplexing readings we engage in the New Media Seminar. As rhetorical questions go, “Will there be Condominiums in Data Space?” is a bit consternating, since the point of view behind it is not immediately clear. Going in, you don’t know whether Viola thinks condos (in data space or elsewhere) are a good thing or not, so it can be challenging to work through an essay that starts with an observation about the unbroken nature of individual existence and then spends quite a bit of time exploring the ways different cultural practices work to create memory systems and idea spaces that presume a kind of holism of experience and creativity. But then you get to this: “There is always a whole space, which already exists in its entirety, onto which ideas and images can be mapped, using only that portion of the space needed.” (NMR, p. 465) Ah ha! someone committed to an infinite conceptual geometry is probably not a fan of sub-divided, individually owned living spaces. Therefore condominiums are probably bad. Whew. And near the end, Viola (writing in 1982) says they would indeed be built into data space: “Today, development of self must precede development of the technology or we will go nowhere — there will be condominiums in data space (it has already begun with cable TV).” Got it. Take care of ourselves or be colonized by condos.  Nurture your networks and pull the plug on the YouTube cat memes. “Little boxes, on a hillside…..” Then, in a most un-McLuhanesque moment, Viola warns that “Applications of tools are only reflections of the users — chopsticks may be a simple eating utensil or a weapon, depending on who uses them.” (NMR, p. 469) Lots of food for thought there.

But the kicker comes in the form of a coda about a porcupine’s encounter with a car on a dark night:

Late one night while driving down a narrow mountain highway, I came across a large porcupine crossing the road up ahead. Fortunately, I spotted him in time to bring the car to a stop a short distance from where he was standing. I watched him in the bright headlights, standing motionless, petrified at this “dose encounter of the third kind.” Then, after a few silent moments, he started to do a strange thing. Staying in his place, he began to move around in a circle, emitting a raspy hissing sound, with the quills rising up off his body. He didn’t run away. I realized that this dance was actually a move of self-defense. I cut the car headlights to normal beams, but he still continued to move around even more furiously, casting weird shadows on the trees behind. Finally, to avoid giving him a heart attack, and to get home, I cut the lights completely and turned off the engine. I watched him in the dim moonlight as he stopped his dance and moved off the road. Later, while driving off, I realized that he was probably walking proudly away, gloating over how he really gave it to that big blinding noisy thing that rushed toward him out of the night I’m sure he was filled with confidence, so pleased with himself that he had won, his porcupine world-view grossly inflated as he headed home in the darkness. (NMR, pp. 469-470)

What do you do with that???? I’m sure our fearless discussion leaders will have their own ideas about the significance of the porcupine’s “grossly inflated” world view, and I look forward to hearing what the group thinks about Viola’s advocacy of matrix structures.

I find something new and invigorating in this piece every time I come back to it.  This time, I was struck by Viola’s artistic commitment to tap into the essential aspects of our humanity – the life cycle and our collective experience.  (You can check out many of his video installations on You Tube.)  I also appreciated the understated summons to think about the “why” as much as the “how” that underlies “Will there be Condominiums…?”  The first video below offers a more explicit discussion of the importance of the why.  The second complements the middle section of “Will there be Condominiums” really nicely it you still aren’t sure how data structures relate to art.  If you are already clear on that, check out the last bit (starting at about 4’15”) on the internet as a representation of human social relations and the “real” meaning (and limitations) of “code.”

 

 

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New Galaxy, New Horizons

We are reading Marshall McLuhan this week for the New Media Seminar, which gives us a nice pivot to thinking about how we prepare for the future and understand the past, especially in times of great change.

One of the themes of McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy is that societies on the verge of massive changes are unaware of the imminent paradigm shift. At the same time, periods of transformation often make the dynamics of the immediate past more apparent. In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi examines the effects of the industrial revolution on the human psyche and the transformations of traditional relationships of redistribution and reciprocity into a “market society” in 18th and early 19th-century England. McLuhan leans on this analysis to develop his own argument about the mesmerizing effect of new communication technologies, insisting that their long-term significance might be inversely proportional to their perceived importance when they first appear:

“What Polanyi observes about the insentience of those involved in the expediting of the new machine industry is typical of all the local and contemporary attitudes to revolution. It is felt, at those times, that the future will be a larger or greatly improved version of the immediate past. Just before revolutions the image of the immediate past is stark and firm, perhaps because it is the only area of sense interplay free from obsessional identification with new technological form.

No more extreme instance of this delusion could be mentioned than our present image of TV as a current variation on the mechanical, movie pattern of processing experience by repetition. A few decades hence it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image. Today it is futile to discuss it at all.” (New Media Reader, p. 199)

The historian in me appreciates McLuhan’s nod to historical perspective. By temperament and training historians value the analytical clarity afforded by (chronological, spatial, conceptual) distance from the events and processes we study. The familiarity of the known present brings the salient pieces of the unknown past into high relief. But anticipating the shape of things to come is another matter entirely. As we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web this month I find myself drawn to assessments of the web’s influence and the essential role it has played in shaping the present. Some late twentieth-century predictions about the digital future seem remarkably prescient, including these from MIT’s William J. Mitchell and former Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow:

The body net will be connected to the building net, the building net to the community net, and the community net to the global net. From gesture sensors worn on our bodies to the worldwide infrastructure of communications satellites and long-distance fiber, the elements of the bitsphere will finally come together to form one densely interwoven system within which the knee bone is connected to the I-bahn. – William Mitchell, 1994

We’re going to have to look at information as though we’d never seen the stuff before … The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns. – John Perry Barlow, 1994

(both from: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/early90s/edgyincisivepredictions.xhtml)

Other predictions were more dire, and many of course, were just wrong. Take a few minutes to browse through the Time Capsule in Elon University’s Imagining the Internet project and you will see what I mean.

As we take stock of the Web at 25 and the internet at about 40 it is both compelling and daunting to think about where we might be headed.  One project worth investigating is Digital Life in 2025, a collaborative effort between the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. Looking at the report’s “fifteen theses about the digital future,” I was relieved that eight of them are characterized as “hopeful.” These include the promise of more democratic, open, knowledge-generating and ignorance-banishing communication between individuals tapping into an enhanced global connectivity, as well as the potential for the internet of things, artificial intelligence and big data to give people more control over their health and well-being. Also in the “hopeful” category is the potential for mobile technologies to facilitate peaceful change and political transformations. The six (much) less sanguine theses about the shape of things to come focus on the potential for “abuses and abusers” to “evolve and scale,” as well as on the intensifying efforts of governments and corporations to use the internet for political and social control.  Concerns about privacy are well-founded according to the “less-hopeful” predictions, which also caution (a la McLuhan) that many of us do not appreciate the profound changes already underway that will disrupt our basic understandings of ourselves as social, political, human animals.

The fifteenth thesis comes as advice more than prediction:”Make good choices today” the report suggests, encouraging us to imagine the different paths into the future and leverage the affordances of the internet to make sure some of the more promising ones come true.  Echoing Virginia Tech’s branded slogan, the final thesis promises: “Foresight and accurate predictions can make a difference; ‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’”

 

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Pretending and Intending

“Animate pretension with intention” enjoins Bum in a Suit, in what is surely one of the most engaging and conflicted “about” posts I’ve yet to read on a new blog.  Taking his cue from Kurt Vonnegut, Bum in a Suit zips straight to the heart of that ambivalence many of us confront when we begin to blog.  For if the internet and its affordances are increasingly implicated into every aspect of our work and daily life , starting a blog is often one of our first deliberate endeavors to create content by claiming and building on a piece of digital real estate.  As Bum in a Suit notes, beginning to blog can feel like an act of pretension: How could the tiny droplets I offer here ever matter in the bottomless ocean of the web?  What agency might my lone ideas exercise against the ever-more-sophisticated algorithms of Google, Facebook and the like? Starting a new blog might also seem futile and /or passe.  As the internet of things rises over the horizon of the internet of information and communication is there really any point to continue to talk to each other?*

I’m going with YES to all of the above (some with more certainty than others), and affirming Bum in a Suit’s decision to blog as an intentional, affirmative and creative act —  one that can, should, must even, make the life of the mind richer and more interesting.  I realize these are bold propositions and not everyone will agree with me.  And that’s fine.  I hope we take all of them up during the seminar this semester. For now I want to note just a few of the many benefits of blogging:

1) Blogging offers an amazingly easy, fast, and durable modality for sharing ideas and research

2) The medium naturally lends itself to thoughtful, documented, distributed conversation about problems and ideas ranging from the practical to the esoteric.

3) Blogging makes it easy to leverage the affordances of a networked environment and tap the infinite and expanding knowledge that the web places at our finger tips.

4) If you are an academic searching for a broader audience or a parachute out of the ivory tower — a blog is your best friend.

I look forward to a seminar loaded with pretentiously intentional posts.

*John Udell has some timely thoughts on the need for “engineered filter failure” here.

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Comic Relief

Today we concluded the New Media Seminar with Scott McCloud’s now classic Ted Talk and a free-ranging discussion about why McCloud’s approach to “visions of the future” affords so many insights about the narrative potential of new media, and why a course on new media might conclude with McCloud’s work.  We all agreed that McCloud packed a lot into seventeen minutes, so I’m posting it here in case anyone needs a second look.

We talked about different ways of learning and remembering, and how our perceptions of space and time depend on a particular symbolic syntax. I was intrigued by testimonials from a mechanical engineer and literary scholar about their use of graphic novels to review physics concepts and teach rhetoric.  I’d welcome references to those books if you have them handy!  For those of you who love the space program or share my interest in historical animals, I’d highly recommend Nick Abadzis’ graphic novel, Laika, which tells the story of the first living creature to orbit the earth.

Although McCloud’s talk highlighted how the print revolution compromised the narrative flow of comics, some of us confessed to a lingering attachment to the printed word.  It turns out that our brains do prefer paper for some things (such as reading), which doesn’t mean that we’ll be doing less reading on screens but might encourage us figure out how to make that experience more beneficial.  The Scientific American article I mentioned is here.

There was more, but I’ll stop now. Thanks, everyone for a wonderful first semester.  I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed our meetings tremendously.  I’m sure next semester’s group will be terrific as well, but their footwear can’t possibly compete with this.

RedShoesWeb2

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Dare we say beautiful?

Our reading for the seminar today is “Two Selections by Brenda Laurel,”  and I am eager to hear what some of the experts in our group have to say about her insights on human computer interaction. My own thoughts about her conception of agency are here, but I’m wondering if they might change a bit after today’s session.  We will have visitors who will surely prompt us to think about, and maybe even experience, human-computer interaction in a whole new way.

Re-reading Laurel’s “The Six Elements” just now, I was struck by this passage:

The notion of beauty that drives Aristotle’s criterion of magnitude is the idea that things, like plays, can be organic wholes — that the beauty of their form and structure can approach that of natural organisms in the way the parts fit perfectly together…..If we aim to design human-computer activities that are — dare we say — beautiful, this criterion must be used in deciding, for instance, what a person should be required to do, or what a computer-based agent should be represented as doing in the course of the action.

Laurel’s focus on organic beauty reminded me of Bill Viola’s holistic conceptualization of data space.  The whole is already there, just waiting to be discovered, engaged, or enacted. In a recent interview with Laurel, Henry Jenkins noted that over the last decade or so, the emphasis in human-computer interaction has shifted from a focus on interactive design and the relations between humans and computers to a focus on participatory design and the social interactions between users.  Laurel sees social media as being more narrative than dramatic, but remains committed to the ideals of the six causal elements of classical drama… which is good, because I need to stay tuned to the whole and the beautiful on a day that came with a good measure of fracture and loss.

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McLuhan, Value, and the Message

I’m sympathetic to Claire’s and Lauren’s assertions about technology itself being value neutral, and echo their claim that it’s how we use the technology (or the medium, since this is McLuhan’s week) that makes it positive or negative. And it is easy to criticize McLuhan for over-reaching and over-synthesizing by reducing the message to the medium and visa versa.

But I fear that stopping at such critiques might make us miss the important things that McLuhan got right, especially the insight about how new media not only condition how we do or experience something, but facilitate a kind of interaction and creativity that opens up more possibilities (and yes, “expands human intellect”).  Like Lauren, I am very interested in the implications of this transformation for my field, which I’m going to claim broadly here as “doing history.”  I could (should?) go on about this for a long time, but wanted to take up her invitation here to (briefly) think out loud about the change in “containers” as it affects historians.

For us, the shift from (printed) book to on-line databases and journal articles is both exciting and perilous.  Like any mode of knowledge production and dissemination, history definitely benefits from having endless (and ever expanding) amounts of information, data, texts, etc. on-line and instantly accessible beyond the physical walls of the library and the printed page of the book.  But shifting “the book” from a codex-paper-format to a digital medium involves much more than changing the container for a certain kind of information. On the one hand, the possibilities are eye-poppingly awesome: hyperlinking and multi-media could liberate most, if not all, of the web of documentation and example that supports the analysis and narrative of the book from paper repositories (archives and libraries) that few readers will ever visit or experience.  There have been a series of discussions in the field about the shape of born-digital history works to come, and Writing History In the Digital Age, just published by the University of Michigan Press, offers many intriguing possibilities.
On the other hand, however, the “e-books” promoted by commercial vendors for research libraries are merely digitized versions of print books with minimal functionality and maddening limitations on their use.  On a good day, these “ebooks” might work for key word or phrase searching, but I don’t know anyone who has successfully “read” one.  And this seems like a real problem, because a book is not just a container for information.  It isn’t a database or a catalogue. It’s a coherent, organized, structured presentation of knowledge and interpretation — A product of human intellect.  New media are transforming the book, and I think we owe it to ourselves to make sure that happens in a way that augments human intellect and makes books better.

I leave you with the parable of the cereal:

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