Clay Shirky, "Here comes everybody"

I am in the process of copying and pasting old blog posts from a Ning class blog. I don't want to lose these observations so here they are.

Clay Shirky does an excellent job of describing the dynamics of collaboration and group interaction in light of recent mass appropriation of online social technologies and tools. I found that his explanation of the "Birthday Paradox", as well as his categorization of "group undertaking as a ladder of activities..in order of difficulty...sharing, cooperation, and collective action" (49) helped me to better understand the incredibly complexity of large networks. There are practically infinite linkages and activities that can take place between members of groups and persons participating on massive sharing platforms or microblogging sites like twitter, yet somehow people manage to find a place or a group to fit into if they search deeply enough or if they know the right people (who know the right people.) These platforms, the relative openness of these networks and the kinds of communicative activities taking place on them allow for real time response to political crises and social events; they also unite people from all over the world and foster work on all kinds of projects at a pace and in a risk-free environment that many businesses and institutions cannot afford to do.

I also couldn't believe it when Shirky cited Wikipedia as a creation dating to 2001- which seems rather recent- and wrote about how it only took on its ".org" form a year or so later, responding to users protesting against its possible commercialization- that fact speaks to how much we make these tools a part of our lives and normalize our use of them in so many ways, including how we interpret the world (as continuously editable!) and how we work with one another.

Personally, I think it is great that CCTE classes and faculty/students here use so many of these online social tools to connect with one another; at the same time, it is rather stressful trying to manage all of these tools (including the ones I have to deal with at work and in life- basecamp, anyone? a CMS for life please?), remembering how we present ourselves on them and finding the appropriate context and tools for the task we wish to accomplish. On the other hand, we are given so many options of (re)presenting ourselves and sharing information to others and this can certainly be a positive thing: we have facebook for our friends, colleagues and family and connections between those people, linkedin for professional networking, online places where we can be an expert or newbie, and so many other resources that we may choose to partake in anonymously, yet still remain part of a "group". In some ways thinking about the Shirky book dispels some of the issues of "community" and "group" that we were having in class discussion last week. Shirky doesn't really mention community that much in his book; he is more interested in the flexibility and spontaneity of group formation. What is the difference between community and group? Is it really that important and is the difference merely semantic?

Which brings me to confess how I love the fact that I can tap into so many groups whenever I want, with as much or as little commitment as I can give (depending on the "promise" and "bargain" offered by the group.) Lastly, I am intrigued by Shirky's comment, "more is different." More may be different on the bigger scale; however, if we were to analyze users and participants on an individual scale, wouldn't we discover that individual Web use, sharing and networking are scaled rather humanly and predictably, and that individuals are still looking towards those with similar interests? I find it so amazing how Web sociality and these communications technologies play with our sense of scale- we are simultaneously part of the large and small, the massive network and the chatroom of twenty devoted members. It is the fact that so many people are contributing to the same places, sharing amongst each other and leveraging their networks around events or certain causes that things are changing.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

As I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I was moved by Jonathan Safran Foer's weaving of past and present memories of people affected by 9-11 and his decision to include accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden. Although he shows parallels in these stories of loss and trauma, we are aware throughout the text of the singularity and exceptionality of each one. Safran Foer describes the very personal suffering of individuals who must coexist with memories and physical artifacts of these events as they go about activities in everyday life- traveling, writing letters, lying to one another, sleeping and dreaming, looking at photos or letters. The characters of Oskar, his grandmother and grandfather attempt to make sense of their lives in a world that moves forward while they remain in a liminal state of doubt and uncertainty. The author captures the frustration they experience when they realize that fundamental, life-changing questions associated with these events will never be answered; thankfully, the author does not present a completely pessimistic picture of human relationships at the end of the book. Each character is presented with an opportunity to re-evaluate the most important things in their lives, and each chooses to engage with their memories in ways that are not self-destructive and directed exclusively inwards. They share their feelings with one another, and are less lonely for it.

I was also reminded when I read this book of my friend who traveled to Hiroshima and saw people’s shadows burned into walls as a result of the blast's impact. What are the artifacts of loss when everything is blown apart and people simply disappear, leaving shadows, and not bodies, behind? I believe our artifacts are memories, texts, photographs, ephemera that may mean nothing to some but everything to others- and as some of my peers have pointed out, Safran Foer offers us many ways of documenting or representing life as doodles or even blank pages.

Given the fact that I don't read much fiction anymore (no time, sadly), I found myself missing the psychological space of novels and the powerful combination of abstraction and intimacy that I experience when reading a good one. Until now, I have not experienced the novel as a way of reflecting upon the events of September 11, and I found that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (through the author's careful writing) existed within a medium that could offer a more thoughtful, nuanced, and honest way of representing the anger, confusion, and sadness of people coping with the aftermath than other representations (fiction films, mostly) or forms of documentation that I have encountered. Even though it may be difficult for many us to verbalize their thoughts in a completely transparent manner, due to physical and social limitations, it is possible to express ourselves more freely through writing, especially in memoir form.

Finally, I want to add that I enjoyed the experience of bringing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close everywhere throughout my travels in New York City. I picked it up at the Strand, and brought it to Bushwick, Washington Heights, into the tunnels of the subway, upstairs, downstairs, and finally to Teachers College. Like the space of memory, good works of fiction allow us to engage in one activity or be present in one space while absorbing ourselves in another. In some ways, the act of reading or writing a novel is to create a safe space for embracing affect that would, in other contexts, be prohibited or ignored.

Veblen & the Leisure Class - Working Hard or Hardly Working?

"Conversely, the greater the proficiency and the more patent the evidence of a high degree of habituation to observances which serve no lucrative or other directly useful purpose, the greater the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in their acquisition, and the greater the resultant good repute." (32)

Below are some assorted thoughts on Veblen:

What characterizes the leisure classes is not simply the accumulation of material wealth, but the belief that they are entitled to such an accumulation (we discussed this in class w.r.t Mills.)

When I read about the wealthy, "leisure class" described in Veblen, I was immediately reminded of auction houses that deal in fine art or luxury property sales. I have never been to an art auction but I have seen them portrayed on television, in the movies, and heard stories about them from friends who work in the business of selling art. The truly wealthy send their assistants or whomever to bid for them- *perhaps this is where the phrase "to do so-and-so's bidding" came from, though I don't know. The leisure class with money aren't even present in these instances! They are doing what Veblen describes, namely, enacting the business of being wealthy and overseeing things from on high, without having to do any physical "labor". I wonder where the idea of large-scale anonymous donations or philanthropy fits in Veblen's idea of leisure class. Is an anonymous donation of a huge sum interpretable as a symbolic gesture of the leisure class' need to conceal their wealth? Is it part of the act of doing something they're "supposed" to do? (though I'm not entirely cynical; I believe that some people make generous anonymous donations for reasons of modesty, and also because they believe in various causes and social improvement.)

Another interesting point that Veblen brings up is the relationship of technology and tools to a societal transformation in ownership. Tools allow for greater productivity. More productivity means more things to accumulate and increased time for those in power to collect and buy stuff. Humans, and animals such as the bower bird, like stuff.

Of course what rich people buy is not necessarily "high-class"; however I'm sure they like the myth that we imagine for them, the greater myth we participate in where we collectively imagine that they buy rich things and have fun activities in the presence of other rich people. Meanwhile, the hardworking, long-suffering staff plot their revenge. Cf. the great movie by Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg, The Celebration (Festen) and countless other narratives in a similar vein.

Barthes and Mythologies

"To keep a spatial metaphor...I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language object and a metalanguage...Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it always to have an elsewhere at its disposal. Meaning is always there to present the form; the form is always there to outdistance the meaning." (Barthes, 123)

To Barthes, myth is a "sign" (combination of signified and signifier) with a unique relationship to its corresponding words, images, or other representations of objects (signifier); the objects that they refer to (signifier); and a larger body of meaning, which he calls "signification". Unlike other signs, myths can have many physical and visual representations; these "forms" point to higher-order, abstract concepts like "imperialism" or "colonialism" or "justice" that attain the status of myth because their meanings are ambiguous, powerful, "motivated" (as Barthes describes them), and connected to our historical and physical contexts. A myth is a representation with deep, often disputed meaning(s) embedded in social norms, activities, objects and ideas, and as I understand it, deeply related to our beliefs and assumptions. A myth is "speech stolen and restored" (125)

My reading of Mythologies leads me to understand Barthes as a kind of detective of meaning. He uncovers the power behind cultural practices and habits that we often perceive to be superficial and popular distractions. The activities of wrestling and striptease are embodiments of spectacles of justice and fear, respectively. Barthes also looks at why these activities have attained such predictability in their execution/performance, and reliability in how they amuse or titillate audiences. As myths, these activities are both capable of fulfilling certain expectations of how we think we should act and behave, and also capable of instilling a sense of fulfilllment (for example, in the witnessing of naked "sex" in striptease, or the thrill and catharsis of seeing someone "deserve" physical defeat in wrestling). What can be considered mythic in our contemporary world according to his analysis? What cultural symbols, activities or representations have meanings that might possess this contradiction of "obviousness" and ambiguity? Barthes seems to consider myths as representations of meaning that can communicate at an individual, personal level, and also at a level that functions in the realm of a "collective experience" or memory. Are myths culturally similar or dissimilar? Can certain types of myths be generalizable across cultures? In other words, do cultures have the same myths? Or same types of myths? How do myths enter and exit in historical relevance? What does it mean to be living in a world where we can continually inscribe meaning onto objects- physical, digital, biological- through recontextualization?

Here are a few quick myth mashups for you. I really couldn't think of anything else, right now, except for Che (sorry Che for more representational abuse- but I use these as illustrative examples). Are myths more or less powerful now because of the sheer number of mythic representations out there, or because now so many more people can repurpose mythic representations, thereby evoking (I speak for myself) mixtures of disgust, reverence, confusion?? As I look at the images below I wonder, how, and why?!?!

$ = Power: C. Wright Mills and William Randolph Hearst

Over break, I visited Hearst Castle, one of many homes of the famed publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst. On the tour, I learned several interesting facts about his life: at the time Hearst built the estate, he controlled 98 business in various industries such as forestry, mining, and ranching, not including his publishing interests.

The estate was built during the start of the Great Depression, though Hearst himself was still receiving a high income of somewhere around 100 million dollars (I think- and that's 1930s dollars too.) Later on, as Hearst's fortune went under, he slowly sold his land holdings (at one point he owned something like 40 miles or so of California coastline!) and his businesses. I don't know the details of how the Hearst Corporation turned its finances around but I know that his family is still deeply involved in corporate ownership and management (W.R.'s grandson, George R. Hearst Jr., is co-Chairman of the board of the privately owned corporation.)

The example of W.R Hearst fits well with many of the sociological traits that C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite underscores: Hearst was wealthy, college-educated, the son of a landholding millionaire mining engineer and businessman. I liked how Mills tried to debunk the idea of a power elite (back then) of immigrants or upwardly mobile lower middle class people by using statistical figures of mostly white, upper-middle class and highly educated shoe-ins for corporate executive positions. His critique of the "entrepreneur" and "bureaucrat" are especially biting, and he argues that most people incorrectly identify the entrepreneur as an individual who has "all the risks of life about him, soberly founding an enterprise" while in fact "[i]n 1950, a far more accurate picture of entrepreneurial activity of the corporate elite is the setting up of a financial deal which merges one set of files with another. The chief executives of today to do less building up of new organizations than carrying out of established ones." (133) Certainly W.R. Hearst wasn't a poor man starting from nothing when he began his publishing enterprises. He had social capital, connections, and financial means, and inherited the first paper he started from his father (who was also a Senator). I wonder how true Mills' idea of entrepreneurship as a somewhat marginal (as in, not making an enormous amount of money) way to start a business holds today in a world of startups, and in a world where we tack "social" onto the term and use it to promote small businesses in developing countries through microfinance and microcredit.

Finally, another major point I got from C. Wright Mills is that survival tactic (and money-bringing one) of the power elite, especially the business power elite, is to consolidate and diversify. Mills points that out in his description of the kind of lateral, industry-influencing decision making that corporate executives must partake in:

"on the higher levels, those in command of great corporations must be able to broaden their views in order to become industrial spokesmen rather than merely heads of one or the other of the great firms in the industry. In short, they must by able to move from one company's policy and interests to those of the industry. There is one more step which some of them take: They move from the industrial point of interest and outlook to the interests and outlook of the class of all big corporate property as a whole." (120-121)


Clearly Hearst Corp. exemplifies this idea: it has broadcasting, radio, newspaper, magazine, and interactive companies; space satellites; a ranch; real estate holdings; and philanthropies- you name it- all over the world.

Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy

Since this was a rather difficult reading, I will clarify major points of Schumpeter's argument for my benefit:

-Capitalism is characterized by fifty year business cycles

-Compared to classical economists, Schumpeter believes that the economic engine of capitalism is not pure competition, which operates on the principle that companies compete against each other to produce the most goods and services at the cheapest cost while making the most profit. In such an environment, the net effect of this type of competition is lowered prices, increased output and the edging out of those who cannot compete. Monopolies and advertising campaigns are cited by Schumpeter as examples of a kind of hybrid competition, where companies and industries create artificial & intentionally high (or low) pricing structures.

-The economic engine of capitalism according to Schumpeter is creative destruction, where
"the opening of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organization development from the craft shop and factory...illustrate the same process of industrial mutation if I may use that biological term- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." (83)

-Creative destruction is the process of innovation and creation of new business models that emerge from technological development (I assume through capital investment) and widespread societal adoption. In other words, new paradigms in production, distribution, and consumption that can be reproduced on a mass scale correspond directly to the profitability and increased output of capitalist institutions, industries and corporations, as well as wealth for individuals (and the middle class) . Although this ongoing process of capitalist development has its winners and losers, it is ultimately of enormous social benefit since it opens new markets (via new products and services) in the process of closing, or destroying, existing ones.

I am interested in the question of credit, technological innovation, and the economic engine of capitalism. Somewhere in this dynamic of boom and bust is the ethical question of how many people (in America and elsewhere) fail to save and spend too much on crap they don't need that is pumped out at exponential rates. What defines innovation for Schumpeter- I have the feeling that he means anything in the business world and in the global flow of economy that mysteriously leads to improved social conditions for people(? not sure about this though) Does his notion of innovation apply to efficient processes like the ways in which global networks of capital investment, credit flows, trade legislation and labor practices are currently managed? The rapid transfer of capital, money, goods and services characterizing our current situation has shaped production, distribution and consumption of the material and non-material (information) world in a way that perpetuates increased output rates and decreasing costs of labor and goods, but also in a manner that can't be sustained indefinitely.

The destruction end of this picture is bleak, especially when we consider environmental costs. I think that at this point we are all aware of the fact that there is so much more to consider regarding innovation for innovation's sake. I am explicitly critiquing the ideology behind "nanotechnology" or Moore's law, ideas that are characterized by the desire to build things that are faster and smaller without taking into consideration the fact that whatever is being produced might be more disposable. Technological innovations related to the speeding up production processes- or chains of distribution- can lead to little to no comprehension and reflection of decisions that consumers might make.

Walter Benjamin, film, and virtual distractions

Benjamin has a very special concept of "art" in mind, if I understand him, when he discusses what happens to works like paintings and performances when they are reproduced on photo, film, radio, and made available to large audiences. They lose some of their special, place-based qualities and sensualities; however, some forms of technological reproducibility, like that of film, allow for new forms of perception and tactility. Benjamin rather beautifully describes the camera's ability to magnify and diminish space, allowing us to see multiple angles, and imagine ourselves in different times and spaces or witness to movements and motions that we would never be able to "in real life", like extreme slow-motion or even the act of montage itself.

We can see the same movie in numerous locations, given the right equipment, but the movie won't be the same, really- the context might change, and the movie itself can be spliced and re-spliced ad infinitum. Alternately we might see numerous locations in the same movie, and interpret the space-time of the movie according to narrative conventions.

I especially like this quote: "For contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment."

I wonder what he would have to say about the fuzziness or poor quality of television, video, web cam communication, and digital video online created by amateurs (not saying that all amateurs post poor-quality videos.) Is art an imitation of life? Is life an imitation of art? Are we looking for "reality" or photographic realism in art? Or are we searching in art for new forms of experience and perception, redefined by "technology" and then by profiteering?

Finally, here's an excuse to put this on my blog: I used to watch Concrete TV, a mashup show on public access tv during my late nights in college. Here's a Boing Boing link. Be warned as some viewers might be offended. There are a lot of women in skimpy outfits, excerpts of car crashes and scenes from kung fu movies. I am so happy that public access television exists, as it is a "somewhat" curated form of audiovisual experimentation for mass public consumption, unlike websites that aggregate everything like YouTube. One could argue though that YouTube videos are curated into channels by individual users.

Also a friend of mine introduced me to this really strange thing called chatroulette that's been the subject of recent press conversation. I guess it relates to this current discussion of new forms of experience via technology. The Fast Company article that I have linked to compares one's experience on the site to "psychedelic performance art territory". I wouldn't advise going on the actual site (well, that's my scholarly advice but you can do whatever you damn well want); in short you can webcam with strangers as if you had ADHD. The point of it isn't to have any kind of extended conversation, but to casually, and quickly, (like literally five seconds at a time) browse through random people sitting in front of their webcams. Life in the age of real-life digital manipulation.

Sharing the future data deluge

Really fun and provocative reading dealing with how to interpret our information-laden future: subjects covered include data management and sharing, online collaboration, the cognitive and physical possibilities of machines, knowledge commons, among others.

Benkler:
The wisdom of crowds can be very helpful to an individual, especially when these individuals are part of an online network that where it is possible to see an organized stream or thread of their communication. I always joke about "outsourcing" my brain to the Web when I feel overwhelmed with school or professional work. I often outsource my brain to unknown "friends" and helpful individuals on listservs or newsgroups when I have questions about a given subject. I shoot them a question and I will always get a few varying answers that help me with decision-making. I don't know them but we are loosely affiliated. They are my personal search engine, humanized.

Benkler is right in stating that as citizens and consumers, and occasional producers of knowledge and information, we ought to value these activities and work towards a global (this is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong) knowledge commons that starts with economically and socially liberal societies. The altruistic motives of groups and individuals in the ecology of liberal information societies/economies is an important factor in how we might persuade policymakers to work towards creating an open online environment, where information can be shared and criticized, and where the democratic function of free expression can be protected and encouraged. Obviously we must acknowledge that the Internet and a networked information economy possesses a basic material infrastructure- cables and electricity and hardware production- and that many of these exchanges have everything to do with the transfer of material goods (e-commerce, for example), and that there might be many complexities along the way to this global information economy involving very real problems of resource management and sustainability.

Kurzweil:
"drugs today are genetically engineered specifically for the individual's own DNA composition. Interestingly the manufacturing process that's used is based on the protein-folding work that was originally designed for the nanopatrols. In any event, drugs are individually tailored and tested in a host simulation before introducing any significan volume to the actual host's body. So adverse reactions on a meaningful scale are quite rare."

This statement tangentially reminded me of an app that I read about online for the iPhone where people are asked to participate in helping biologists fold proteins. I like how ordinary people who might never participate in this sort of scientific research are asked to contribute not only because the tasks required of them might entertaining and cognitively challenging in and of themselves, but also because it extends to intrapersonal relations and health issues. In my mobile phone learning class, we discussed the use of "dead time", time where people might have previously been idle (such as waiting in line) as an opportune moment for establishing a learning environment and perhaps helping people engage in productive collaboration via their portable networked devices.

One scary thing about the Kurzweil reading concerns the notion that if our health systems, diganoses and prescriptions are so personalized, what will we do about synthetic or other viruses that may be constructed the same way? Will viruses then be so personalized that we won't have generalizable tools to combat them? The scales of data collection and management we have to consider may be focused extremely specifically, on individuals, or may cast a wider net onto mass populations.

The Fourth Paradigm/Cognitive Load/Beating a Dead Horse:
One theory that I've heard over and over again since coming to TC is that of cognitive load: perhaps the reason why we need to parse this information is simply because our minds can't handle it all. It's clearly been an issue especially with the endless proliferation of data in real-time monitoring systems. What are the critieria used to analyze data? What tools should be used to do this, and how might they be available? How might one design a data management system that is flexible and precise in query targets? Do I get to help answer these questions in any way, or is it up to computer engineer whiz-kids at Google, or other places that jealously guard their algorithms (built on the backs of our searches)? Since when does Microsoft of all people care about the open engineering and filtering of information? Bah.

Development, sustainability- mutually compatible?

Collier: Bottom Billion
I feel like the Collier reading gave some me perspective on the other side of the trade coin (I have been exposed to mostly literature against "liberal" free market trade agreements/policies with developing nations, but maybe that's just my own bias towards what I want to read and not necessarily what I should read, namely, texts that explore multiple dimensions of international trade.) After I read the sections we were assigned, I have to admit that I did feel like a bit of a false expert in International and Public Affairs and Development. I wonder if all literature in I.P.A and that kind of writing is as "bullet-point" as Collier makes it to be: he creates a catchy term, the "bottom billion", and classifies the problems of developing countries into four common-sensical traps, like conflict or being resource-rich. It was refreshingly direct in its prescriptions, shall I say.

Collier gets down and dirty by advocating external control- essentially occupation- of rogue states. Do I agree with this? Some countries, like Somalia, or Sudan, are completely out of control and have been in civil warfare for decades. Should there be more multilateral effort to control places like this? Collier rightly points out that his position might be interpreted as a neocolonial one. The word "security" is such a damned word at this point, especially in light of the idea of a secure Iraq or other countries with semi-functioning governments that were later intentionally destabilized. Iraq was secure in some sense, before the war. The countries at the bottom billion are not- they seem to be zones where there is little to hope for when people are threatened left and right by robbers and by paramilitary organizations with no interest in a stable government.

Appadurai: Fear of Small Numbers
I liked how Appadurai constructed his argument with the idea of minority, in the context of representative democracy, with its positive political intonations, and the idea of a "substantive minority" as a group that could be politically destabilized or marginalized because of their small, vulnerable status as citizens or residents that might have some kind of sub-citizen or lower social status.

The targeted killings of distinct populations is something I never considered as a mass, that is, cross-country or cross-cultural, phenomenon. Appadurai puts these killings into a framework that is global, a phenomenon of large-scale minority elimination. Although there's something tricky about generalizing these murders and crimes across the contexts of various countries, perhaps Appadurai is right in stating that there are certain tactics targeting minorities (use of media, for example, as in the Iraqi beheadings) that are cross-cultural and globally penetrating. He argues that these tactics have been appropriated to create a fear of the minority, a fear of political instability in a world that is unstable in too many ways to enumerate.

Minority takes on a larger meaning in our world, as Appadurai mentions, when we consider the migrations of various ethnic populations now far-flung on the globe. In comparison to several hundred years ago or thousands of years ago, populations still migrated, but the total global population was much much smaller. Minorities have increased in number over the centuries and millenia- both in terms of how many different minorities have been created (as artificial political entities, in the opinion of Appadurai), and also in terms of quantity, if we examined a single "minority" population.

Global Population Stats from World Bank via Google

The stove article in the New Yorker:
I had to look up a photo of the stove, as I often do when reading descriptive texts about objects or appliances that I know nothing about. The project to create an inexpensive, useful and safe stove is indeed an important one that should be financially supported and publicized more, at least in mainstream media.The Buckminster Fuller Institute is one example of an organization that disburses financial awards to projects that are designed with sustainable processes and/or materials, and have potential global impact. Other projects that are inspiring to me in this way are ones where researchers are developing building materials that fit the needs of a particular climate or region, with sustainable, locally produced and/or easily transportable materials.

Finally, a word on the word "sustainable development" - are these terms mutually compatible? We hear sustainable development" being used all the time, and across these various readings and lectures the word "development" was used a lot, as was "sustainable", but not together. Is the project to engineer and distribute a better stove for countries that need them an example of sustainable development? I would say so.

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part I

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."
-St. Augustine

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor… While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
-Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

From the early days of the printing press to our present day experiences with electronic media and Internet publishing, ideas of space and time are directly related to the way they have been expressed, preserved and circulated through physically reproducible artifacts, like printed books, as well as more recent "immaterial", electronic forms. In this essay, I would like to address some ideas relating to the spatial and temporal consequences of two communications technologies, namely, the printed book as it might have been circulated and received after the introduction of the first printing press; and the popular and educational adoption of the electronic web log, or "blog" in the latter half of twentieth-century. Writings by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Benedict Anderson offer two different perspectives on book reading, writing, and reception, while Manfred Steger’s definition of globalization and my own personal experience of maintaining a blog inform how I consider the latter type of media.

Before discussing the texts, however, I would like to define “technology” as a concept that is not limited to definitions of "hardware" or "equipment", or any kind of "material" construction devoid of human interaction; nor is technological development or understood as a linear process of scientific research, technical innovation and public adoption. Rather, I adopt Pinch & Bijker's idea of the social construction of technology, and their description of a sociology of technology as the "explanandum, not the explanans" for "the success of an artifact" (406), as a way of thinking about the book and the blog. Technology should be considered from an understanding of "a body of knowledge and a social system" and embedded in multiple historical processes and discourses (Layton 210). Lastly, in the spirit of Eisenstein’s conjectures, I would like to put forth some conjectures of mine regarding blogging as a social practice, and “doing history” with the blog as an intellectual one.

Benedict Anderson and Elizabeth Eisenstein present interpretations on the consequences of the printed book with somewhat overlapping historical and geographic foci. Eisenstein concerns much of her study with differentiation and divergence across the Western European populations who read, authored, published, governed or oversaw the process of print and distribution. As a historian, she attempts to overturn prior historical tendencies of generalizing the standardization and accessibility of print shortly after the invention of the printing press. Using innumerable and often contradictory examples, Eisenstein argues that the effects of print media did not necessarily impact the general population of Europe on an even, measurable scale. Many of the events and perceptual shifts she describes happened as “a large cluster of relatively simultaneous, interrelated changes” (2). In her research, she postulates that printed media led to the development of regional networks of printers and their various clients, and to diverse populations of the literate and casual book-reader throughout Europe (Eisenstein 5). Typographical fixity, image reproduction and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information allowed for scientific maps and texts to be distributed, cross-referenced, and standardized in format or content; at the same time, new hybrids of texts from old and new books came into existence (Eisenstein 8). New kinds of workers, such as compositors, were needed to meet the demand for printed works, and new categories of readers and writers, such as the writer-aristocrat, were also becoming apparent in the “age of incunabala”. Many of the groups of people involved in the creation and dissemination of texts, such as printers, scholars and priests, experienced dimensions and consequences of print media that were not applicable to book-reading populations. Literature intended for very specific audiences, such as texts on childrearing and etiquette, law, and esoteric religion and philosophy, was produced at much higher quantity than before (Eisenstein 40).

In comparison to Eisenstein’s examination of the variances, subgroups and networks of readers, writers, publishers, and other populations involved in the supply and demand of printed texts, Anderson offers up a novel interpretation of the printed book and the beginnings of print capitalism as agents of burgeoning national consciousness. The narrative world of books and what he calls “print-language” is presented as a linguistic innovation and a psychological paradigm for populations to imagine themselves as part of the emerging community of the nation. As Anderson states, “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed in their secular, particular invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44). Print-language preserved in a portable, visual and somewhat unchanging form, and distribution of books to a reading public (however segmented in occupation or socioeconomic strata), created fields of commonality and shared identity. New forms of narrative shifted temporal perception from ideas of omniscience and “simultaneity-along-time” in the medieval period to “empty, homogeneous time…measured by clock and calendar” (Anderson 24).

The World in a Blog- or Book- Part II

To read the first part of this essay see the previous entry entitled Part I

Another formulation relating space, time and communications technologies might be: how have the printed book or the electronic blog changed our notion of travel and accessibility to other cultures and ideas? In my blog for class, I write about how electronic communications technologies allow for an increased awareness of both location and dislocation because of their capacity for increased connectivity to physically distant and unknown people:
Our subjectivities and ideas of relating to one another have grown paradoxically larger and smaller. We may know more about our online friend in Southeast Asia who we have never met than we do our local politicians or neighbors. Or else we might conceive of global community as something exclusive to a certain group of people (by this I mean the Muslim concept of “umma” in the Steger reading. Or we might never leave Manhattan but spend all day trading stocks on the international market via the Internet.

Before making any generalizations about electronic media, however, it is important to emphasize that much of the world’s population who do not have access to computers, let alone the Internet and browser capability. Additionally, many people are still illiterate and cannot make use of these new forms of communication that still require reading and writing skills. Any study of the consequences of blogging and the socio-historical aspects of interactive communications technologies should bear these contexts in mind.

The awareness, perception, or mentalité, depending on which historical or phenomenological framework I am choose to use, relates to temporality, the Internet, World Wide Web and acceleration of information and material transactions: we can access real-time information on weather, news, blog entries and commentary all over the world. The convergence of communications platforms such as mobile phones, GPS satellite data, databases and networked computers allow for synchronous communication with people next to us or in remote areas, akin to Anderson’s imagined community of the nation, that we will probably never meet. The nation, however, is not the entity that is used to describe the space of these events – instead the metaphors we see and hear are ones associated with the “world” or global entities, such as the “World Wide Web” or to use an earlier term that we have encountered in class, Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” in the electronic age. Some of the geospatial visualizations and technologies available to us as business or educational tools, or voyeuristic opportunities, are both local (Google Street Maps/View) and global (Google Earth/remote sensing satellite images).


Using a combination of technologies such as the Web, the personal computer, mobile phone, and blogging platforms, we can read, write, and edit while moving from one place to another, and see feedback from our posts, if our blogs are popular, and respond within moments. We are able to communicate with these technologies in a way that decontextualizes our physical location, if we choose to remain anonymous. Alternately, we reveal our location and ideas, intentionally or unintentionally, to people using local idioms and references. When we publish our blogs, we anticipate our main audience to be speakers of our language; however, how are we to know that our readership is not limited to our friends and family or our local networks? We may not know this unless we choose to publicize our blogs (or have others do so to our knowledge or ignorance), tag entries appropriately, and track the demographics of our readership. One can argue convincingly that the exchange global goods, services and ideas is more readily available to people with portable purchasing, publishing, authoring and searching technologies than to prior readers and writers of the printed book or newspaper. Manfred Steger describes the sense of compressed and elongated notions of space and time that has characterized periods of world history in his definition of globalization:

“a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality...movement towards greater interdependence and integration..an uneven process...with four qualities or characteristics:
1) the creation of new, and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that cut across traditional political, economic, cultural and geographical boundaries
2) the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities and interdependencies
3) the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges & and activities
4) globalization processes do not occur merely on an objective, material level but also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness.”

Part of me wants to avert generalizing the experience of using high-speed communications technology, since there are so many issues of financial and geographical resources and timing that make communication possible on the networks that we use; however, the experience of using these technologies and learning from them is real for many of us at Teachers College, as evidenced by the computer-based demands of this particular class and the kinds of feedback and exploration afforded by our course wiki and individual blogs. Blogging, like book-writing and reading, is becoming a normalized practice in the everyday life of people who have access to these technologies and use them for information, entertainment, education, or therapy. Recent statistics from a Pew Research Center survey report that 33% of Internet users read weblogs and over 12% of Internet users maintain a blog (Smith, “New numbers for blogging and blog readership”). Maintaining a blog or wiki to elaborate one’s ideas with colleagues, students, or members of the public has become, in many parts of the country, an important part of collaborative academic work and to some extent, normalized in our day-to-day life.