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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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A dog’s job

As expected Richard Bulliet’s Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers elicited some strong (and not entirely positive) responses this week – which is great!  I’m really grateful to Corinne and Kelly for pointing out the obvious problem of theorizing domestication without looking seriously at the dog – which has been more implicated in the emergence of human society than any other domesticate .  Perhaps Corinne will want to look at dog domestication for her research project later in the term?  While I’m typing, I thought I’d highlight this new study about social learning and imitation in wolves (which revises earlier research that gave dogs a leg-up in this area).

But the main reason I’m posting is in response to Tanner’s discussion of “salience”, which offers terrific insight into why we humans find it so easy to disregard issues, things, and creatures we find uncomfortable, unpleasant, and outright ugly.  Take this photograph of a dog watching the sunrise over the Himalayas, for example.

http://500px.com/photo/52866292
http://500px.com/photo/52866292

As 21st-century Americans we find this image compelling, beautiful, and perhaps a bit haunting.  What is the dog doing there?  Who does he “belong” to?  What happened to him?  The answers laid out in photographer Sebastian Walhuetter’s blog post will probably surprise you.  And they should definitely give us good food for thought on how to think about cultural context, history, “ownership” and agency – whether we’re looking at a dog doing his job or using an image on the internet.

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Deep History and Domestication — New for Spring 2014

Welcome to Deep History and Domestication 2.0!  This semester’s colloquium brings back some of the greatest hits of last year’s course, along with some new offerings that promise to keep us thinking, debating and writing throughout the term.  Among the latter are some readings that suggest how our relationships with other creatures shape our humanity, in the present as well as the remote past.  We’ll be reading portions of Rob Dunn’s provocative The Wild Life of Our Bodies, and Ceiridwen Terrill’s haunting tale of life with a wolf-dog hybrid named Inyo.  Reindeer People, Goat Song, and Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers are all back by popular demand.  The syllabus is posted on Scholar and on the left side of the mother blog.  I am eager to meet you all and look forward to working with you this semester!

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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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