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.)

Carey, the Telegraph, digital time and the voice of energy

I loved this reading, because I think that Carey points out an important historical, social and economic moment that should be common knowledge, or at least taught more in schools, and that is is how our current system of time zones and coordinated timing of trains (and the stock market thereafter, most likely) came into being. According to our reading today is the anniversary of the first time people in the USA conceptualized the nation continentally in four time zones by matching major city clocks across these zones. I like how Carey writes about the telegraph as having such far reaching consequences in narrative style and human speech, in changing human thought to understand the possibility of instantaneous communication over a long distance. It probably isn't a coincidence either that when I type in "telegraph" into Google's search engine, the first item that appears in my browser window is a link to the UK newspaper, the Telegraph.

My father has worked for decades in the telecom industry and he spent his early career as an electrical engineer at Bell Labs before deregulation. I never tire of telling people how proud I am of his work- he was involved in the research and development of early frequency control devices, oscillators made first of quartz and later silicon, that control digital devices by stabilizing their electrical signals. In essence they act as clocks for digital devices, controlling the stream of 1s and 0s in our iPhones and computers, amongst other more sophisticated electronic devices and machines. I am (obviously) too young to remember the telegraph but I do remember early telephones developed by AT&T for consumer use that enabled people to see the person they were speaking to on a small screen above the keypad. I thought these machines were revelatory at age 7, and so did the people at the AT&T convention we attended, but consumers never wanted to buy $1000 telephones even if they could see their friends and distant relatives on them. Perhaps the 'transaction costs' were too high. Now, we have virtual teleconferencing capabilities and telepresence technologies that make use of the Internet, though the costs of these media is still prohibitive to some extent to the mass market (at least in the latter technology.)

I'm going to end this post by citing the lyrics to The Voice of Energy, a lesser known song/speech through vocoder by one of my favorite music groups, Kraftwerk. I have always been a fan of their playful yet obsessive engagement with technology, electricity, electronics, and communication. Carey says this, tangentially, and I agree- changes to synchronous/instantaneous communication technology depended largely on controlled manipulation of electricity, which dates back to the late 19th century- quite recent! Back to Kraftwerk, though- I think that their continued use of metaphors linking humans to machines is appropriate to our discussion here and also to Carey's notion of discourses of electricity and religious ideology:

Kraftwerk
 - The Voice Of Energy

Hier spricht die Stimme der Energie

Ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer Generator

Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft

Und ermoegliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild

Durch den Aether auszusenden und zu empfangen

Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich

Deshalb huetet mich gut
 Mich, den Genius der Energie
***

This is the Voice of Energy

I am a giant electrical generator

I supply you with light and power

And I enable you to receive Speech,
Music and Image through the Ether

I am your servant and lord at the same time

Therefore guard me well

Me, the genius of Energy

Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson has me wondering how much of a "community" like the nation is in fact "imagined", that is, related to my presumption or belief that I have historical or social affinities with people whom I will never see. I find it hard to conceive of the "Nation" (the capital "N" is intentional"), a seemingly enormous and somewhat ambiguous entity, as a "community" in the first place, since the latter term carries with it connotations and associations of the local, of smaller, more focused boundaries and perhaps a different kind of social participation than the national, semi-abstracted scale of a representative democracy.

We see national symbolism around us, and systems of representation that reach into our personal and political identities. Even I choose not to call myself American for whatever reason, I can't escape the fact that identity by way of country of origin is linked to how other people perceive me and how I am recognized by my government (if I want to be legally recognized with attendant Constitutional rights.) Is national awareness a matter of social conditioning and construction like we said in class? Aren't nations a little too gigantic to be functional communities, if even imagined ones? Clearly Anderson is trying to do is change existing anthropological and sociological ideas of "community" from their roots in observed and rule-based structural analyses to something more psychological, attitudinal, and even technologically defined.

On another note, when I think about all of our discussions about technology, education, and life and literacy in the past versus the present, I always return to the same head-scratching paradoxes. We are living in a world where depending on the scope of our investigations of human patterns we can find elements (to name just a few) supporting the predominance of globalizing forces that reach beyond traditional "imaginings" of the nation, like the force of stock market, trading, and extensive trans-national currency systems and forms of governance/justice. On the other hand we are right to believe that the governments of nations instrumentalize the idea of the "nation" as imagined community to shape themselves and wield sovereignty over other nations or disputed territories.

It's so difficult to think about the importance of nationalism without thinking about globalization (and capitalism and colonialism) and all of these ideas turn into one giant historical game of Chicken and Egg, at worst. I do like how we are discussing these ideas from the lens of communication and media, and the entryway of print and language as central to the process of nation-building, identity politics, and popular culture. I also think our discussion about generational attitudes towards media is worth returning to for the last part of this blog: There is definitely a push and pull of different generations, from inside the family, to the makeup of institutions like schools and government throughout the world, to negotiate the influence of popular culture through music, television shows, movies, video games, and the technologies that transmit or mediate these elements. Do these products represent their home nations (or not), and how critical are they to establishing an imaginary collectivity and sense of "community" in their dynamics of language, space and time along the lines of what Anderson sees in print media? I see a strong demographic and ideological segmentation in the "imagined-ness" of the nation, and that even within one nation different groups will embrace or reject cultural products as representative of their nation. And because people have migrated and settled all over the world at this point, it makes analysis even more difficult. Think of the rejection of "Slumdog Millionaire" by many Indians all over the world and also in India- it was passed off by many for portraying India in a negative light, as an impoverished nation and full of the standard cliches pertaining to countries with regions and people in different stages of development. Yet what do the statistics of recent urban Indian poverty show? If the film was directed by an Indian person would it have been portrayed and received differently internationally, as "authentic"? Who can criticize national identity- the insider or the outsider? How do we imagine our nationality now in a world that is both nationalist and post-national, depending on who you ask and where you are and what angles you are comparing? Just some thoughts.

Elizabeth Eisenstein & Conjectures on Printing

I've heard the book that this article eventually becomes cited innumerable times, and I was happy to finally read the initial investigations. The little voice in me of proper historical method was first irritated that Eisenstein lacked much empirical evidence to back up her conjectures in this particular article, but it didn't matter later as the article developed and readers like myself could see how her project is twofold: one, to bring a revisionist angle to current accepted facts regarding history of printing and books, attacking generalizations such as "the book led to standardization in language and religious thought" and "the religious standardization of printing and language led to a demystification in texts and social practice"; and two, to bring questions of printing's "effects and consequences" into other fields of research, such as technology, sociology, the political economy of media, language, and theology/religion.

As Eisenstein says, the history of printing and its ramifications is "uneven", with differences in the kinds of social, religious and political impact depending on the scope of one's research. For example, Eisenstein brings our attention to how book printing had numerous distinctions for its first consumers, who themselves varied in demographics, and in what they perhaps wanted to read, what they could read (based on limitations in literacy and in government or religious-decreed access), and their level of access to books. Some other thoughts I gathered from this article (though it sort of conjectures a little too far into the present at the very end) relate to methodology: good historical research needs to constantly question assumptions and also that the printing of books is an example of an object of study where there is a clearly meta-communicative and meta-investigative level, especially for the historian. Books are not exclusively disposable commodities- they are objects that can be constantly re-circulated, and their content is in some sense another form of sociopolitical or socioeconomic value: books can increase one's skills, change or reinforce one's opinion, and bring about non-localized or localized solidarity.

The same is true today vis-a-vis more "immaterial" non-printed forms of content and their corresponding economies of information distribution and circulation, which are products and processes clearly linked to (and also divergent from) economies of book distribution. Regarding non-printed text, I think that format does play a huge role in distribution and in acceptance of content. How differently do we treat reading ancient documents in comparison to the windows we read onscreen? How does our attention change in relationship to these reading formats? How might our attitude change when we look at books versus computer printouts or flyers we get on the street? How might certain formats work well with specific kinds of content? I recall feeling a little disdain when I first saw the Kindle. Are children reading PC tablets or text on the iPhone as their versions of "My First Book"?

Victor Hugo & Frances Yates

In The One Will Kill the Other, Hugo links the the death of the symbolic power of buildings and monuments with the invention of printing and the mass circulation of books. He organizes his argument around what he imagines edifices and monuments to represent and even embody, namely, the rise of certain theocratic civilizations and the unity of ideas and people. With the rise of printing, however, comes the twilight of architectural innovation and the proliferation of endless derivatives of earlier forms of building. Conversely, in the world of human ideas, the printing of books allows for a multiplicity of opinion: even the possibility of dissent and revolution.

I found it curiously ironic that Hugo uses a/the book as a metaphor for both architecture and printing. He calls one the "Bible of stone" and the other, the Bible of paper" (180). That analogy reminds me of former ideas of the indisputability of truth in writing, which like architecture, was considered a sacred practice (think of the Mosaic tablets and rituals of the Freemasons.) Of course I can't speak of the emergence of the printing press without speaking about current ideas of computer and information technology, desktop publishing, and the Internet representing, for some, the death of the text as a fixed, non-editable "whole." I don't agree with ideas that books are dead, necessarily, or that they existed as some pure form of knowledge- the writing, editing and publishing of books have always been a messy affair, in terms of problems of translation, access, and distribution.

Yates credits the anonymous author of the Latin text, Ad Herennium, with first describing the historical technique of memorizing sequences of images and ideas in accordance with the mental placement of these ideas on selective locations. This technique was instrumental to orators and scholars who 'mentalized' knowledge with great effort, since they did not have the ways and means of conveniently writing their ideas down and bringing them around. People practiced generating ideas, remembering their sequence, and finally delivering their speeches convincingly; in some ways, they made their minds a kind of portable locus of patterns of ideas and images that could be easily expressed in speech. Yates even mentions how the art of memory had significant ethical value, and how Thomas Aquinas attributed the virtue of prudence to artificial memory.

The chapter reminds me of how much current literature in education stresses conceptual thinking over memorization of small details (or curriculum based entirely on memorization without understanding.) Memorization of ideas and words is still desired in many areas of study, including anatomy or other biological sciences, as well as in language acquisition. Also, memorization practices and techniques are still critical today to the performing arts (theater, music and film), though the techniques for music and theatre are more related to kinaesthetic and syntheaesthetic memory- bodily repetition- than merely mental imaginings to trigger a pattern of thought.