“What Does a Professor Do All Day, Anyway?” by Ed Ayers who teaches history at UVa.
Ed’s one of the best around. The piece is ten years old, still well worth the read. For those who hate academics because we teach a couple of classes a week and spend the rest of the time working on our golf swing, Ed breaks it down hour by hour.
George’s entry this morning drew my attention to the thread on Wealth Bondage and the string of really viscious and ad hominem comments levelled both toward individuals and the academic institution. Well, sad to say, it doesn’t surprise me. Other than some spam, the only two comments I’ve ever wiped from this blog have been from the “editor” of an organization called academicsatire.com which consisted of nasty little attacks on me, on my wife, and on our “privileged” lifestyle. Then there’s the general culture we live in, at least here in the States, where the word “academic” borders on a pejorative, where “professor” is a vaguely ridiculous title conjuring images of an absent-minded rumply eccentric who can’t quite get it through their pointy head that no one really takes their kooky ideas seriously. (Coincidence that in many states these days higher education is first on the budget chopping block while K-12 is treated—rightly—as sacrosanct?)
I’m tired of it. I’m proud of what I do, and I think it sucks that we’ve developed such a collective certainty that “academia” isn’t the real world, that the ivory tower really exists (tried MapQuest, couldn’t find it), that ideas, even “theory” are irrelevant.
Sorry, no comments on this one. This isn’t intended as a nicely reasoned argument. I’m just speaking my mind: academics get angry too.
Via Slashdot: “Is the Internet Dying?”
So, between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected. In its place I expect to see a more fragmented network - one in which only “approved” end-to-end communications will be permitted.
Interesting to me as yet another reminder that while you can’t see, hear, touch, or taste them, bits still have their own weight, measure, and mass.
Lately I’ve been unwinding with Bravo’s re-runs of the The West Wing, a show I’ve followed off and on over the years. Tonight’s episode, “In Excelsis Deo” (original airdate 12-15-99), is worth a comment. The A-plot involves White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler arranging a funeral for a homeless Korean war vet who is found frozen to death on the National Mall wearing a coat Ziegler had once donated to goodwill (with business card still in pocket, hence the connection). It’s the final sequence, in which the vet’s funeral at Arlington is juxtaposed with a boy’s choir carolling the “Little Drummer Boy” at the White House that’s really exquisite. The genius is in the visual and audio editing, not the writing. As the camera builds its parallels between the honor guard and the choir, between Toby and a handful of others grave-side and the festive White House staffers, between the flag-draped casket and the decorated tree, the choir music binds it all together. The way Toby (a veteran himself) and Mrs. Landingham (the President’s Secretary, who we’ve learned has lost two sons in Vietnam) flinch—flinch violently—as the honor guard fires its volleys is also extraordinary.
Please understand that this usually isn’t the sort of thing I go in for: it’s awash with boomer sentiment, there’s nothing subtle or politically aware about it—but it’s also just about the most effective thing I’ve seen on network TV.
I’m aiming to buy a digital audio player. Any advice?
iPod looks good, of course: no one I know who’s got one has ever wanted to give theirs back. But I’ve also been eyeing Samsung’s Yepp YP-900GT, which is now set to be released in October (the date keeps getting pushed back). The Yepp has (or will have) a 10 GB drive, an FM transmitter (so you can pipe output to, say, your car radio) and, best of all from my standpoint, direct CD encoding—meaning that you can convert to MP3 or other formats straight from the stereo, without the computer as the middleware. I’ve got too many peripherals as it is and I’m also not looking for another keyboarding task, so this feature alone could sell me assuming the unit gets decent reviews overall.
Anyone know of another digital audio player that offers that kind of direct encoding? Anything else I should be looking at besides Yepp and iPod?
The Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies (that’s WAGPCS) has posted its calendar of talks for 2003-2004. The meetings are all held in the Jefferson building at the Library of Congress. In March I’ll be giving a talk based on the chapter in my book on hard drives entitled “Extreme Inscription: New Media, Magnetic Media, and the Limits of Writing.”
The electronic book review now has the first installment of a five-part cluster on the Politics of Information, co-edited by Marc Bousquet who I used to knock around with on the MLA’s graduate student caucus. Marc (and co-editor Katherine Willis) have been at this for a while and it’s great to see it all coming to fruition. (I have a short piece in one of the later installments.)
Props to Joe Tabbi and crew for continuing to make ebr work and making it relevant. The whole shebang will also be available from Alt-X as an e-book.
Update 9/3/03: See “Virtuality and VRML: Software Studies After Manovich.”
BardCode is the complete works of William Shakespeare, encoded in barcode format. No shit: “BardCode spotlights the looming constriction of the public domain that is ushered in by cryptographic enclosure movement, a movement codified into U.S. law by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
Anyone figure out what the Bardcast feature is supposed to be doing?
Via George, I learned this morning that Walter J. Ong, S.J. has died. When I first read Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in graduate school it was one of those books where the answers were kept: that is, it articulated a set of ideas I had instinctively believed were important, but which I had thus far lacked the vocabulary or thought structures to express. It would be an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that all of my current interests—textual studies, design, new media—stem from this one volume. I’ve since taught the book to both undergraduate and graduate students and it never fails to elicit that most valuable of classroom responses: “I never thought about that before.”
Update: I neglected to mention that Ong was a student of Marshall McLuhan when he did his master’s in English at St. Louis University.
One day in the future all the lights in the city go out. The turbines stop, the telephones become quiet, the traffic lights shut down, TVs dim and computers download, and elevators wedge between the office towers’ floors. Hospitals with battery-run backup supplies stay functional, but the banks and the stock exchange with their E-Money, the government offices and transnational boardrooms, the TV studios and radio stations, the cafes and bars and restaurants, are all unplugged. We’d be engulfed by a night unlike anything anyone has known since before the Edison Illumination Company lit up New York City in eighteen eighty-two, extending the hours of the day, turning the streets into a twilight spectacle of artifice, priming the crowds for the first time to watch and wait. The city would wink out and everything would shudder, flicker, and slam back to the time of candles, torches, and bon fires, and the smell of kerosene and wood-smoke. . . . In that break, massive and complete, we would realize how the private and the public realms have been fused into a giant network with every point subject to what arises elsewhere.
—B. W. Powe, Outage: A Journey Into Electric City (1995)
The more I think about it the more I think terms like “the computer” or “electronic textuality” are meaningless, or if not meaningless then meaningful only as shorthand for what we the computer really is: a dense, dense site of interacting inscriptive and representational technologies, from paper to the cathode ray tube to magnetic media to the mechanical typewriter (and of course others too). What are we really talking about when we talk about electronic textuality? The characters on the screen? If so, then in fact what we’re talking about is the cathode ray tube, a technology that has its own distinct material history quite apart from that of digital computing. If we mean stored “bits” then we’re talking about magnetic disk or some other storage media. And if we mean something like computations or machine logic then what we’re talking about are voltage increments and decrements that are notionally inaccessible to the human sensorium and accessible only as second order models or abstractions—that is, as representations, which are immediately implicated in other material technologies, a phenomenon Bruno Latour has described as the cascade. Thus Donald Knuth, author of the most important books we have on the nature of algorithms, took a ten-year detour to develop the typesetting language TEX in order to print his equations to his satisfaction.
In other words, “the computer” should not be understood as an entity that is materially stable, but as a linguistic convenience always on the verge of imploding from the centripetal energy of the numerous and varied technologies it serves to host. That some of those technologies (like the microprocessor or the mouse) have no practical use outside of the discursive constellation of “the computer” while others (like the keyboard or the printer) have more or less obvious correlatives in other media ecologies is beside the point: what I’m trying to get at here is the way that terms like the computer function linguistically to occlude the identity of the media that are the machine’s material make-up. Of course one could argue that this is a logic of infinite regression cloaked in the language of essentialism: what, after all, is the cathode ray tube but its own artificial horizon of constituent media and mechanisms? Well, precisely. Technologies have an almost fractal dimension, with planes of functional identity appearing and disappearing at the points where particular social, economic, and cultural pressures have combined to create necessary fictions like “the computer.”
. . . have that experience where you’re rereading something you haven’t read in a long time, like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 for instance, and as you read something touches your memory about a passage that once moved you very deeply, but you can’t remember anything else about it, only that it’s there, up ahead somewhere, and so you read on, but as you read the not-remembered passage pulls at you and begins to take shape, limned by solitary words that loom out of the passing text like milemarkers in the headlights, telling you you’re close, almost there now almost there, giving the almost-not-remembered passage color, contour, until you feel you could recall it if you wanted to but you don’t because what you really want is to feel like you’re reading it for the first time when you get there, and then—just like that—you are and you do, like “other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of copper wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages.”
Alphabetization, says Patricia Crain in her excellent The Story of A (Stanford UP. 2000), denotes “the constellation of activities and practices—often amounting to rites and rituals, both individual and institutional—that surrounds the learning and teaching of the alphabet” (7). The term was popularized by Friedrich Kittler in his monumental Discourse Networks 1800/1900, and has recently been mined for new work by Crain, Lisa Gitelman, and other scholars of media and inscription who I’ve been reading. So you can imagine my inerest to find this bit of coverage of the California recall, which informs us that “alphabetical order” is not, in fact, a fair or adequate heuristic for listing candidates’ names on the ballot. Today in Sacramento a lottery was held to determine the order randomly: R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A, H, B, S, G, Z, X, N, T, C, I, E, K, U, P, D, Y, F and L.
This is SOP, for CA elections anyway.
Seem silly? It’s not according to election officials, who claim that the lucky candidate can expect a 5% bounce from being listed first. In any case, this instance of de-alphabetization defamiliarizes the ABCs enough to remind us that the standard sequence is indeed an instance of artifice, held together by (no more and no less than) collective custom and convention.
Great stuff waiting in here. Sites like this should be the starting point for any number of new media research projects—and companies should be lobbied to take responsibility for documenting their own corporate histories.
Don’t miss the company rally song (ca. 1931).
Via Slashdot, this Slate piece on internet book piracy. The basic premise is that as illicit page scans (such as those made of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix) or outright hoaxes (such as the “new” Naked Chef cookbook) promulgate, the publishing industry faces a crisis akin to what the music industry saw with MP3. Oddly, the Slate piece does not make the historical connection to earlier eras of book piracy, notably the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the practice was rampant (Dickens, to name just one popular author, was pirated relentlessly). What this history teaches us is that words have never been quite as fixed and authorially stable as we like to think; a contemporary reader picking up the latest Dickens could never be sure that what he or she held in their hand was what Boz really wrote. Book piracy has been explored most fully by Adrian Johns in his magisterial The Nature of the Book, where he argues, pace Elizabeth Eisenstein, that the trustworthtiness and reliability of the printed word is a relatively recent development, born of a concerted effort by the modern publishing industry and not print’s “natural” tendency toward stability and fixity. From this vantage point, the supposed post-structural fluidity of electronic text celebrated by many theorists is not a new phenomenon or a product of the medium’s radical new ontologies but rather an inherent aspect of what another critic, Jerome McGann, has called the textual condition.
All of this seems to me to resonate with the current discussion on blogging and ethics and rules for writing. Textual history teaches us that authors have been taking back their words for a long, long time (in the form of variants and revisions and new editions), and that “their” words, as we read them on the page, might or might not originate with the person named on the title sheet. In other words (so to speak), the textual critic knows that all writing is, of necessity, social. Authors write their books, but so too do their alter-egos (“Boz”), spouses, friends, editors, publishers, designers, critics, readers, and rip-off artists. Indeed, from this very climate sprang modern copyright law, at the center of so much discussion in the social software community. Social software itself, along with specific forms like blogs or wikis, would not be inherently strange to a reader in Dickens’s London . . . and the notion of an author taking back or not standing behind (or else standing alongside of) his or her words would just be in the nature of that familiar piece of social hardware, the book.
A very recent interview with John Unsworth, who is about to take the reins as Dean of the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science (the number one library school in the country). “The paradox of the academy is that, although it doesn’t really inculcate or encourage risk-taking, it does actually reward it.” Good luck, John.
Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media project has been around for as long as I can remember so I doubt it’ll be new to many here, but I wanted to blog it anyway: what an incredible trove of links and documentation. See in particular the dead media working notes.
KF is writing about the need to re-read. Well, here’s a disconcerting thought: reading is a woefully inefficient way of processing information. (I know, I know: who reads just to “process information”? But bear with me a moment.) Let’s say that you’re a committed reader who completes one book a week, fifty weeks out of the year. (I know, I know: we don’t always read cover to cover. But bear with me a moment.) That’s fifty books a year. Let’s say you start reading at the age of 5, and live to the ripe old age of 85, reading fifty books a year every year in between. That’s a mere 4,000 books in a lifetime. (I know, I know: what does the word “mere” really mean in that sentence?) Now think about how much you actually retain from the books you’ve read, and add KF’s re-reads into the mix.
There are, I believe, something on the order of 50,000 new books published by the major commercial houses every year in the USA (not bad for the “late age of print”). Thus, a dedicated reader, in his or her lifetime, could reasonably expect to finish no more than a fraction of the titles brought to market in a single industrialized country in one year alone. My point is not that we read just to “process information” or that reading can really be measured strictly in quantitative terms. But still: those numbers are a little humbling, aren’t they?
Update: See Jason’s comments here.
So I’ve added a little area at the top of my right-hand column (in green) to describe current research and teaching activities. I like it, but there are two issues nagging at me that I’d love some help with from any CSS/MT gurus:
Also, any other design feedback from regular readers? For instance, is the greyscale gradient in the blog entries attractive or merely gratuitous? Anything else?
I’m all ears . . . and I’m also happy to post (or email) code for anyone who would like to see it.
Update: Well, so, I nixed the green. I’m just going to keep it simple for now.