Progress Report (or, a Report on Tangential Knowledge Production)

The first semester of this course, which is only one credit (we meet for 50 minutes a week), has covered an astonishing and impressive array of topics, from which we are beginning to articulate the lines of critique that our second semester (a full three credit class) will pursue.

Here is what our class has read, on the iPad, as a way to think about iPads and the contemporary condition of e-reading:

We began by reading Robert Darnton's The Case For Books: Past, Present, Future. With this book we have discussed the quest for better (or wider) access to library holdings, and the differences between internet knowledge and book knowledge.

Then we took a detour into three works of short fiction:

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"
Barry Lopez, "The Mappist"
Bruno Shulz, "The Street of Crocodiles"

With these stories, we thought about how humans record, archive, or map knowledge, and we discussed the limits and possibilities of these various acts. We also questioned the figurative language of place and environment in these works, and we wondered about a potential analogy in the digital realm: does the internet function as an alien medium—like high altitude air, or deep sea—where one can become overwhelmed by information currents, data flows, and visual riptides?

Next, our class will read & discuss N. Katherine Hayles's article "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes."

Meanwhile, the students have each selected one of the following titles, and they will present reviews of these texts during the final weeks of this semester:

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins

The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman

The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), Sherman Young

From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts, Peter L. Shillingsburg

Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray

The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Richard Lanham

Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, N. Katherine Hayles

Hamlet's Blackberry: Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, Ted Striphas

Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Douglas Rushkoff

Babbling

I'm writing this on my iPad.  It's 12:30 in the morning; I've been up thinking about our class yesterday, madly wracking my brain in response to Janelle's challenge to come up with a reading that might serve as a catalyst for next week, much as Borges's "Library of Babel" inspired us to think about Darnton's fantasy e-book that he plans to write—or in Darnton's excited words: "An electronic book about the history of books in the age of the Enlightenment! I can't resist. I'll take the leap." Instead of leaping, I want to slow down. (For those of you who have been reading Edward Abbey in Green Literature, I might take his cue and crawl.)  

But I am already in an uncomfortable position. My neck hurts.  My posture is terrible: I'm sitting cross-legged on my couch, hunched over this glimmering machine (tablet, miniature obelisk, or what have you) and writing on the app iDo Notepad.  I really want to close this iPad and switch to my MacBook Air.  But I won't, not yet.  For the sake of the class, I'll continue to use the iPad.  But I'm not convinced that this new media device lends itself to essay-thinking.  I'm feeling Chris Langer's weirdly contemporaneous nostalgia for the laptop as a serious writing tool—oh, for that old feeling of composition that I know so well!  For the familiar and kind layout of Microsoft Word!  Instead...plunking away on the iPad, trying hard not to think about what else I could (or should?) be 'doing' on it.

I want to revisit and unpack some of the frustrations I was feeling in class yesterday.  Around our discussion of "The Library of Babel," we tried in earnest to visualize the postmodern aesthetics and logical puzzles laid out by Borges.  Mary invoked existentialism, and advocated "choice" in the face of the abyss.  Josh called on Nietzschean theories of eternity and recurrence.  Robert raised the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  Rolando referred to yet a second Borges story.  Janelle cited Italo Calvino. All these references, spinning wildly around one another, seemed to somehow 'apply' to the Borges piece ("The Library of Babel"), and perhaps also to Darnton's wish image for the e-book (as explained in Chapter 4 of The Case For Books).  

But were we in danger of conflating these philosophically distinct and historically unique expressions?  Nietzsche was critiquing a specific form of morality, within the context of German Romanticism, and offering a jubilantly alternative way to think about human existence (whether he even really 'believed' it or not is another question; it was, in many ways, a thought experiment: 'creative writing' at its best).  Sartre, Camus, and other existentialists were responding to historical episodes in the early 20th-century that threatened to render human activity mundane and meaningless at best, and hugely destructive at worst.  I am not too familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or what specific historical circumstances it emerged from (and I am not going to refer to Wikipeida right now, lest I fall inevitably into the informational abyss of internal links that Jeffrey narrated so well in class)—but I do recall how the Ethan and Joel Coen deployed this trope in a quasi-scientific way in their neo-noir film "The Man Who Wasn't There", where the idea (as I recall) seemed to function as a sort of cultural intrusion into and break from the black-and-white certitudes of mid-century Americana.  Borges, finally, plays with genre expectations and the possibilities of the story that invites the reader into a mise en abyme; one might suspect that this aesthetic tactic stems from the sheer excess of meanings generated by what we loosely term "postmodernity."  

Now these are all worthwhile humanist pursuits, and fascinating in their own rights.  But they are not aimed at a singular goal, and neither are their historical contexts easily equatable—I think we should be extremely wary of conflating them or even supposing any smooth interpretive links from one to the next.  Even more troubling to me, however, is whether any of these theories or aesthetic strategies is up to the task of thinking about the "new media" problems posed by Google Books, the iPad, Apps, Facebook, etc.  On the one hand, I completely agree with Mary that the "information landscape" (as Darnton calls it) is hardly 'new' at all.  On the other hand, phenomenally as well as phenomenologically speaking, we do have 'new' matters to attend to, and I want to rigorously probe the finite matters directly in front of us: the material culture and contextual realities that are driving 'new media' into everyday life scenarios.  Or to return to Janelle's insistent demand from a few weeks ago: what is the CONCEPT that we are addressing (or trying to get in view) here?  I'm not sure we have that concept down—and I'm not convinced that any of the above mentioned frameworks get us any closer to defining it.  I was intrigued by Amalie's claim in class that Borges's library feels all too real, all too well like like how her brain feels a lot of the time ("this is your brain on postmodernity"? Or: this is your brain, period?).  But I want to develop this impulse.  I want to know what this really feels like, by what actual structures and signs—and from what supposed center—we might be able to identify (or identify with) the informational phantasm at hand.      

So, what do I want us to read for next week and discuss?  After puzzling this over, my mind settled on Jacques Derrida's essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences" from 1966, a date that I admit might mark this text as also not being up to the task of thinking new media.  But Robert and Janelle and I have agreed to hold off on theoretical texts until next semester, and probably for good reason: we still need to arrive at a concept to theorize. So do not read that essay yet, even though I have linked to it; or read it, but hold it in reserve.  

A work of short fiction, then: a story by Barry Lopez called "The Mappist."  It's from a collection of stories called Light Action in the Caribbean (published in 2000).  I'll scan this story by Friday afternoon and post it on our course BlackBoard.  I want to think about how this story figures into the information matrix that we've been discussing, and also how this story calls forth the looming specter of 'infinity' that has popped up from time to time in our class.  Sometimes I think it is all to easy to invoke infinity, and yet perhaps a lot more difficult to talk about finitude: the real limits and physical boundaries of human experience and knowledge, which are perhaps masked or pushed to the side amid the new media frenzy.  

I'll end here, for now.  Okay, did I ever forget that I was 'writing' on the iPad?  Maybe, for a few minutes here and there, amid sentence constructions.  Maybe I was rash in supposing that the iPad is not up to the task of essay-thinking.  Maybe it's me who has to catch up to it.  I'm trying to track the double theme of our class: trying to read the digital human (the human being in a digital context), and read WITH the digital human—paying attention to how I am enmeshed in this context, in fact creating it around me (and in me) as I type each word here.  (And where is 'here' any more?  Has this word shifted its function? [I said I was ending "here" a few sentences ago—look how that location slides across space and time...])

An iPad Christmas in September

The first meeting of our “Reading (w/) the Digital Human” created the excited chaos of a large-family Christmas morning. Instead of 4 year-olds with dolls and trains, we had 14 college age students tearing into iPad packages, leaving plastic wrap, cardboard, and Important Product Information Guides scattered around the room.

On our second day, now with working iPads, we found that a class of college students assembling in a room with new toys only want to talk about their new toys. Some people were confused and frustrated by the “magical” device, while others had already embraced the magic.

From a pedagogical perspective, what was interesting was how much the students were engaged. Granted, receiving the coolest new gadget that has appeared in nearly a decade (since Apple’s iPod) will pretty much guarantee student engagement.

To get into the class, students had to blog during the previous semester about their interests in the intersections between technology and reading and writing. So with 14 students primed for discussion this semester, we knew that talking about the how technology changes the experiences of reading, writing, of being human, wouldn’t be a problem. However, it was.

Being the first class with animated iPads, students didn’t want to discuss the implications of the devices; they wanted iPad show and tell. Everyone was talking about apps, finding apps, what are apps, apps for that app, etc. They had totally immersed themselves, not as scholars with a certain amount of rhetorical distance between themselves and their object of study, but as consumers. And herein lies Apple’s genius. Much like all other Apple products, the excitement the device creates in the early stages of interaction seems to be a closed loop—the students were not looking at what the device could really do but simply looking at the device. If the iPad is truly magical, initially, its magic seems to be that it hypnotizes its user, much in the same way television does—it doesn’t matter what’s on, as long as the TV is on. The question for us, as teachers, will be “can we productively harness that chaotic energy or will we be cleaning up torn, discarded wrapping paper and packaging all semester?”

Teaching with the iPad

The first two days of class have yielded interesting results. The fervor of the new device has not died; indeed, the students seem all too eager to discuss what is "cool" to do with/on the iPads. Curiously, a lot of these cool things are simulacra of activities we are already familiar with: highlighting, taking notes, using a grocery list to shop for food, identifying overheard songs, and so on.

To be totally honest, I found the second day of class to be vaguely nauseating: the hype factor around the smorgasbord of "apps" that promise a sort of personalized utopia, if that is not an oxymoron. However, later that day I noticed one of my students in another class taking notes on her iPad—and I was actually pleased with the appearance, the affect of knowledge-absorption emanating from the little titled screen in front of her, positioned next to a traditional paper book.

Next week we will begin to discuss Robert Darnton's The Case for Books, and I am eager to see how we shift from the object-as-text, to a text-as-text: how easy or difficult it will be to track the medial layers of Darnton's arguments as they unfold on our screens.