The World in a Blog- or Book- Part III

Please see the previous two entries for Parts I & II.

Perhaps one way to think about communications media and its attenuating psychological, temporal and geographical flexibility is how we manage our communication technology. Our blogs are quite flexible: we can continuously add new posts, delete previous posts, or change the overall design and categorization of posts. We have also discovered that organizational methods, like time-stamping blog entries and tagging articles for improved searching, helps us to create a system for tracking our writing and to aid us in our reading. Our systems are a means of preventing cognitive overload given the amount of textual and visual information we create or consume. They can also help publicize our work and interests to others. For example, we may choose to display where we live or work online so that those near or far can contact us for information or connect to our resources. These methods allow us to make sense of our shared reading and writing habits.

There are many more questions that emerge from examining my blog and the readings of this semester relating to historiography and methodology: firstly, how has the discipline of history and how have historical methods changed with technologies like blogs, the Internet, hypertext, and other documents and resources on the World Wide Web? What metaphors are we using to describe these phenomena (I mentioned two earlier, “global village” and “world.”) Are we becoming our own historians and archivists by documenting our lives with rapidly accumulating texts, images, and sounds? How do we study history when our primary documents are dynamic and interactive, as in the case of blogs and wikis? Do we read the “edits” page of Wikipedia entries as a document of history made transparent because we can see who corrected what entry and when? How do we consider the history of communication if our documents of study become increasingly disorderly, editable, and authorship is anonymous or questionable? How do we ascribe credibility to continuously changing texts? What is popular may be judged so based upon the opinions of an uninformed or uncritical mass, as we have learned from Jarod Lanier. Will we rely increasingly on algorithms, or on the online feedback of groups or individuals, to determine the importance of content? How do historians measure the importance of various events when so many experiences are documented and in so many ways? How does the scope of historical research change with hyperlinking, or when researching blogs that are not only singular entities, but connected to other blogs? How do we think about texts and sources that are dynamically populated with commentary, content and images authored by people all over the globe? In some ways some of these questions are distantly related to earlier problems of anonymity and authorship in ancient documents; however, what was previously rendered anonymous in the non-print world, may be rendered anonymous now on a much larger scale.

The two epithets at the beginning of this essay were selected because they linked now-clichéd metaphors relating books to physical worlds, and electronic books and texts to instantaneous accessibility to knowledge. Current communications technologies complicate how we examine knowledge and information because our objects of study are no longer easily bounded by physical spaces or timescales associated with printing press distribution or other forms of media that are less “instantaneous”. One word I have heard repeatedly throughout this semester in various classes is the word “multimodal.” What does this word mean in the context of the blog and print books? What does it mean to live in a world where communications technologies allow for expression in a multimodal way, with opportunities for us to access information and content in many different places and times? Although we can incorporate tracking programs into our blogs to understand how many people visit them and for how long, we cannot predict their social relevance, how they be recontextualized by others and by ourselves, or even how they will even look or sound in several years.

I have ended this essay with far more questions than answers for how we understand our relationship to history, time and place, reflecting the thought process of my past blog entries. These questions might serve as entryways for studying how we integrate technologies into our everyday lives, how we might teach or learn from them, and how we might make distinctions in their use and reception. It is a confusing and exciting time to be a historian, journalist, teacher, student, diarist, hobbyist, knowledge worker, pundit, self-described expert- whatever you want to call the individuals or groups of people who use and contribute to the discourses afforded by blogging or any other form of computer-mediated communciation. Will our blogs serve as historical documents and testimonies of our lives in the beginning of the twenty-first century, just as paper-bound journals, printed newspaper and written ephemera served to assist in the research of historians like Elizabeth Eisenstein or others we have read (or even to assist ourselves in research, as academics and educators)? Just as the Annales historians that Professor McClintock spoke of earlier this semester brought attention to the human life outside of the explicitly political sphere, so there are many opportunities today to study the microhistories of people as they document their lives and thoughts in websites, wikis and blogs.

Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Brin, Sergey. “Google Books Settlement Agreement.” Web. 12 Dec. 2009.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report.” The Journal of Modern History 40 (1) Mar. 1968: 1-56. JSTOR. Web. 11 Mar. 2009.
Layton, E. “Conditions of Technological Development.” Science, Technology and
Society. London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977. Print.
Pinch, Trevor J. & Bijker, Wiebe E. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or
How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit
Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14, 1984: 388 - 441. JSTOR. Web.
10 Feb. 2009.
Smith, Aaron. “New numbers for blogging and blog readership.” Pew Research Center’s
Internet & American Life Project. 22 Jul. 2008. Web. 14 Dec. 2009.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Commentary/2008/July/New-numbers-for- blogging-and-blog-readership.aspx
St. Augustine, City of God, New York: The Modern Library, 1994. Print.
Steger, Manfred. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003. Print.

McLuhan & some thoughts on TV

The semester is getting crazy and my wrist is killing me from all this typing. Is my laptop an extension of my wrist/brain/arm/eyes... to use McLuhan's idea of media as extensions of the senses...or is it the other way around? here a few notes:

***medium is the message/media are an extension of the senses
I find it hard to believe that people used to write everything on paper, including novels and philosophical texts that in printed book form are hundreds of pages long. The Constitution was of course famously drafted by hand. The famous Domesday book in England is thousands of pages long, as were Bibles copied by monks. Didn't the wrists of drafters of these documents hurt too after awhile?

I can appreciate McLuhan for this concept of "the medium is the message", and also for taking analytic emphasis away from the content of media towards an understanding media as any kind of technology that extends our senses, thereby changing our consciousness in some way. Media were criticized back then as they are now for disseminating controversial content. How do they impact our learning and understanding by triggering or enhancing certain cognitive functions? In Understanding Media, McLuhan conjectures that forms of media allow fuller engagement with humans, as he believes in the case of television and the media of our electric/electronic age. How true is this? He makes the comparison that while print individualized and privileged the sense of vision, television brought about more sensory awareness and viewer participation, as well as greater geographic and cultural awareness. I am left wondering what is it about television's characteristics that contribute to emergent human attitudes and perception vis-a-vis print?

I used to hate television, but I love it now- I love the stories and the short time commitment I have to an episode. I don't think that I subscribe wholesale to "the medium is the message", but I certainly think that types of media certainly contribute to the making and shaping of a message. Maybe during McLuhan's time, television did bring more "reality" into the household. In the fifties, when Understanding Media was written, writers, actors, producers, camerapersons, light, sound and makeup artists crystallized their skills into the format that we most associate with television: 1-hr episodes with intermittent advertising. Sitcoms from that time period are less interesting to me in some ways that other kinds of shows, like ones that taught cooking, or game shows where people could win big. The advent of television was the advent of a new babysitter and ersatz parent: kids could be entertained by moving sound and image in a safe environment, at home, and maybe even learn a little in the process of viewing. People watched events like the moon landing or sports events take place in a way that photos just did not communicate- in a breathless, "I am watching this happen live" kind of way. Advertisements were much much longer back then and generalized to a wide audience of viewers, perhaps to a much different effect than than they do now, in small, customized bits and pieces, on the tops of our screens or embedded into the videos we watch online.

***global village/tribes
Television seems like one way to utopia/peace as McLuhan describes it, the whole global village metaphor and all. I don't like his hot/cold media spectrum. Also I cringed a lot when I read all of McLuhan's generalizations about literate and preliterate humans and their dispositions to certain kinds of thinking..what did he, a celebrity academic, know about the functions of tribal society anyways? Does he realize that tribal society is not necessarily harmonious...but full of conflict and tension and emotional or political manipulation like any kind of human organization?

The Control Revolution

"Weber included among defining characteristics of bureaucracy several important aspects of any control system: impersonal orientation of structure to the information that it processes, usually identified as "cases," with a predetermined formal set of rules governing all decisions and responses. Any tendency to humanize this bureaucratic machinery, Weber argued, would be minimized through clear-cut division of labor and definition of responsibilities, hierarchical authority, and specialized decision and communication functions."

-- From The Control Revolution, James Beniger, p. 15

Beniger's description of Weber's definition of bureaucracy made me laugh and reminded me of the experience I had just gone through prior to reading this introduction. I had recently experienced some problems with the database on my website, and I went through my hosting company multiple times to ask some questions. Each time, I spoke to a human who recited a script and followed various protocols in order to assist me. I was put on hold multiple times before I finally reached the right person in the right department and was handed various case numbers and that sort of thing. All in all, I was happy to speak with a person rather than a computerized/automated system that responded to vocal cues, numbers and specific words- experiencing a robot voice rather than a human person in my experience is incredibly frustrating when one is faced with any kind of technical or logistical problem. In a way, the experience was as efficient as I could possibly imagine, yet in another it was incredibly redundant as I was forced to repeatedly state my name, recite pieces of various contact information, and answer my "secret question" to people in each department.

On a more theoretical note, Beniger in The Control Revolution has me wondering in his text where the role of nation-building, the emergence of the nation, the consequences of colonialism/empire, and mechanized/modern warfare fit into his theory of a 19th-century crisis of control and the subsequent restoration of economic and communicative order, a macro-change in social, production, distribution, and information processing relations that he calls the Control Revolution? (p. 26.) Where do these political, economic and social events or shifts fall? Are they too obvious in terms of their societal and economic influence? I think the answer to that might be yes, but at the same time his introduction seems a bit anemic to me when these issues are not at all addressed, even by way of a disclaimer from him.

I've also been thinking about what we were asked in class: what characteristics or conditions of the Industrial Revolution led to the growing need for rapid, inexpensive and widespread communications technologies, developing forms of organizational management, information processing capacities and information management sciences? Was it new forms of transportation that changed our economic system and made it more efficient or even possible to buy and sell at a distance? Was it a need to expand existing governments by demonstrating economic and social influence wherever possible? I don't know how to answer these question in a few sentences, truly, but I feel like there is something missing in Beniger if he does not include the role of national infrastructures as critical to making these changes. I wonder how many of these material and societal changes via technology came from top-down or bottom-up, from private or governmentally funded institutions or organizations, in terms of their research & development, implementation, and publicization of the usefulness and appeal.

My other question is: where are the humans in Beniger's analysis? In all of this I am wondering about human agency in the world of control, if we are more than just creators and then parts of these systems he speaks of. The world appears awfully reductionist in some way if everything is thought of in terms of control, or lack of it. For some reason I got the impression that Beninger describes all humans as roughly the same, as part of the managerial/economic/productive/telecom/industrial order of things, or else he doesn't describe us at all (those who don't fit into the picture or who are left behind the control system, or who are exploited by it.)