From Word To Word

Some time ago, I discovered an online essay by Lev Manovich, called “Database as a Symbolic Form“. It is a condensed version of a chapter in his book, The Language of New Media, which has been sitting on my shelf for almost a year, one of the many books that I am always intending but never quite managing to read. The essay’s central argument assumes that, where the age of the novel and film privileged narrative as “the key form of cultural expression,” the computer age privileges the database in its stead. It argues that new media objects often lack stories as such, being comprised of many equally significant elements that have no essential beginning or ending and no form or development of any kind. In my opinion, however, the assumption that a database does not function narratively is highly suspect for several reasons.

First, from a technical perspective, the elements in a database are never actually equal in significance. They are always entered in a sequence, and they are assigned their position in a sequence. Some element will always occupy the first position (1,1) and will function as a beginning. Some element will always occupy the final position (x,x) and will function as an ending. Other elements will always occupy the positions between them and will function as a development. This beginning, this ending, and this development will always combine to form a narrative, even if this narrative is only of the simplest kind, even if it only says, “Look, though there are only seemingly random numbers, here is the highest number and here is the lowest, and here is the one that is repeated most,” even if it only says, “Look, though there are only unrepeated and seemingly meaningless symbols, this one looks something like this one that came before it, and there seem to be many symbols that have curves, while only a few have angles.”

No matter how random and meaningless the elements of the database might seem to be, these narrative functions are always operative, because of the conventions that govern reading and writing, whether these are the coded conventions of a machine reader or the social conventions of a human reader. Even if the writers or the readers do not in fact follow the established conventions of the code or of the culture, they must nevertheless follow some convention, must produce some sort of narrative, and must always do so in the context of what the established convention is, even if only through opposition to these conventions. It will never be possible for them to write or read without a narrativity, and it will never be possible for this narrativity to be entirely dissociated from the established narrative conventions.

Second, every element in the database is itself the function of one or more narratives. It is always artificially isolated from a story that is ongoing in the world beyond the database, even and especially if the elements are random numbers chosen for their randomness, even and especially if they are only meaningless symbols created for the purpose of meaninglessness, even and especially if they are only natural elements chosen for their naturalness. In every case they will be the products, the signs, the representations of at least one and probably many narratives.

To ignore the role of these source narratives in determining the data in the database is to ignore their physicality, their historicity, their locality. These sources are not always visible through the data that they produce, but they are nevertheless essential to the production of the data as such. In this sense, the database might even be said to be more narrative even than a traditional narrative, because it combines all of its source narratives into a single master narrative while still maintaining these sources as separate narrative elements in ways that are difficult for traditional narratives to accomplish.

Third, it is obvious, particularly in light of the kind of work that Jacques Derrida and others have done on the function of the archive, that it is impossible to understand the database apart from the narrative of its own production. In every case, the database is constructed by a particular producer for a particular purpose, even if that purpose chooses to take a form that appears random or purposeless. The database is therefore always and entirely implicated in the narrative of its own production and creation, in the narrative of its own purpose, whether political or aesthetic or functional or whatever, and in the narrative of what it may in fact produce in those who read it.

There is no escaping these narrative aspects of the database, and there is no separating them from the social, political, cultural, and economic implications that such narratives entail. To pass over the narrative function of the database is to impose on narrativity an artificial limit and an illusory exteriority. The only database that could actually occupy this position would be one that was neither written nor read, one that was neither populated nor empty, one that was neither ordered nor random, one that could be defined only by a language so paradoxical as to have become a theology.

I often find that the web moves to quickly for me.  I come across an interesting post or article, something that warrants serious reflection, something to which I would like to respond, but by the time I have formulated my thoughts on the subject, the post is days or weeks old, and the discussion has long since shifted to other things.  I had this experience a few weeks ago when I read James Shelley’s post on his “bulldozed brain“, or on how new media is saturating him with so much information about people that he no longer has time to relate to these people in person.  I thought it was a compelling article at the time, but I am only just now finding the words to respond to it.

The issue that James raises is one that very much concerns me, and I have spent a good deal of the last few weeks reflecting on it, formulating the question, as I often find myself doing, in terms of the books that I am reading, in this case, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.  I am not sure that I have arrived at anything coherent, but there are a few ideas that I think might be helpful in understanding how the web mediates social relationships.

Using Debord’s terminology, I would suggest that the web, especially with the kind of applications that have been labelled as web 2.0, where users create content for one another, has dramatically shifted how spectacle becomes produced in our society.  Spectacle has until recently been the language spoken by the dominant modes of production in order to mediate social relationships in such a way as to create people as consumers.  Now spectacle is increasingly becoming the language that consumers speak to one another as they produce content for one another.  While practices of consumption are and always have been productive of something, the web permits consumers to produce for one another to an unprecedented extent. Consumers have essentially become producers of their own spectacle at precisely the same moment that they are consumers it, though they always do so within limits imposed by the dominant modes of production.  They produce themselves and their relationships as spectacles for others to consume.

This shift in how spectacle is produced has several effects.  First, it ties the language and the production of spectacle much more closely to the social relationships that spectacle mediates, so that the two are now almost indistinguishable.  Traditional media like television and print presented spectacle in ways that appeared fairly distinct from the activity of social relation.  Even if people do gather socially around these media, and even they provide the subject of much social interaction, there is no illusion that people actually relate through them.  With web media, however, especially with many social media sites, but even with less direct means like blogs and emails, there is the illusion that relationships are being actually conducted through them.  Thus, rather than having spectacle mediate social relation as an effect of its consumption, spectacle now mediates relationship as an integral part of its production as well.

This is what creates the compulsion that James describes, the compulsion to consume more of the web, because there is the illusion that this activity is in fact relational. The relationship, however, is not between me and my friends, but between me and the spectacle that my friends have created themselves to be, a spectacle that functions precisely like a tabloid, only with the added personal interest that comes with actually knowing the celebrities involved.  I learn much useless information about these celebrity friends, these friends who are spectacles of themselves, but I come to know them very little.  Because spectacle appears on the web as indistinguishable from the relationships that it mediates, the consumption and production of this spectacle takes on a significance that other spectacle lacks, and people feel a compulsion to consume and produce it for one another.

The shift in how spectacle is produced also has the effect of extending exponentially the saturation of society by spectacle.  While the language of spectacle was mostly the domain of the producer, the necessity to profit from spectacle always placed limitations on how completely this language could be spoken.  There was only so much television and so much radio and so much live entertainment that couls be made profitable, and there remained large, though certainly diminishing, portions of social interaction that escaped the direct mediation of spectacle.  As soon as consumers begin to produce their own spectacle, however, the necessity of making a profit no longer limits this production, or limits it in only very indirect ways.  In fact, the only effective limits for this kind of production become the  constantly expanding limitations of the technologies themselves.  Users of web media, therefore, are saturated with spectacle to a much greater degree than users of traditional media, particularly as the web becomes increasingly portable via cellphones and and other handheld technologies.  There are no longer any spaces that remain absolutely beyond the reach of media spectacle, and there remain very few that are practically beyond this reach.  It is now possible to conduct our relationships in entirely mediated ways, entirely through the mediation of the spectacle.  Indeed, the sheer volume and reach of spectacle produced through the web compells users in this very direction.

This, then, is the effect that James describes in his post, where the web produces far more information about people than he can possibly assimilate.  As opposed to traditional media, which could only produce so much spectacle and tailor it to our interests only so closely, the web permits us to produce immense amounts of current information that is tailored just for us and that is at least superficially connected with people to whom we feel some sort of obligation.  What is more, as soon as I begin to respond to this information, I begin creating it for others also, and I only increase the immensity of the social spectacle available to myself and to others.

Now, this shift in the production of spectacle to the consumer of spectacle is not necessarily bad.  It does, in effect, within very set limitations, permit the consumer to take the role of the producer.  I use the word ‘role’ here very specifically, because the consumer never has real control over how this production takes place, but there is nevertheless an opportunity here, I believe, for people to produce in ways that were unforeseen and are even resistant to the applications that they use.  There is the possibility, not to change society, or to change the mode of production, or to change the web, but to operate within these structures in ways that are tactically resistant to them, in ways that change only ourselves and perhaps those who we influence directly.

Shifting now to the terminology of Michel de Certeau, whose book I have not yet finished, and whose ideas I therefore reference with a certain amount of hesitation, I would say that the web, by permitting the consumer to take the role of the producer in even limited ways, becomes an interesting tactical space.  De Certeau recognizes, what is true, that all practices of consumption are productive of something, and he is interested in the tactics that consumers use in order to produce effects that are unintended and by producers and even resistant to them.  It seems to me that, if this is true of a system in which consumers have little access to the role of the producer, it becomes much more true in a system where consumers also play the role of producers, even in limited ways.  Though this new role may only serve to tie consumers more tightly to the spectacle that defines them as consumers in the first place, it may offer more opportunity for the kind of tactics that de Certeau is describing.

For me, the logic of this move would look something like this:

1.  The web permits the saturation of society and the mediation of social relationship by spectacle to a degree that was completely unattainable through traditional media, simply because it employs consumers themselves to produce their own spectacle.

2.  The web permits tactical interventions by consumers to a degree that was completely unattainable through traditional media, simply because it allows the consumer to play the role of producer within certain limitations.

3.  Therefore, we must approach the web tactically, in order that its spectacular effect might be exposed, and in order that its resistant opportunities be exploited.

4.  Therefore, we must also develop and disseminate tactics that are useful to this end, employing them here and there, now and again, where they might do most good, in the spaces that are opened by the kinds of freedom that the web permits to consumers as producers, to you and I.

This is, I believe, the challenge to all of us who would do the web justice and who would use it to do justly.

A few months ago, during my failed attempt to use this space to manage online media, I posted very briefly a link to the manifesto of an organization called Ars Industrialis, which was formed several years ago by Bernard Steigler, George Collins, Marc Crepon, Catherine Perret, Carloine Steigler, and some others. The manifesto essentially argues that technologies of knowledge, communication, and information, which it describes as technologies of spirit, are becoming centralized and subjected to market forces in ways that threaten the life of the mind. It maintains, however, that these technologies also have the potential to inaugurate a new era of the life of the mind.

I concur with the manifesto in several respects:

1. That the life of the mind is substantially threatened by the subjection of technologies of spirit to the requirements of the market;

2. That practices of technologies of spirit need to be developed that will actively resist the subjection of these technologies to the market; and

3. That these practices, to the extent that they are successful, hold the potential to invigorate and vitalize the life of the mind.

However, I am suspicious of the manifesto in several respects also:

1. That it idealizes a past epoch and a possible future epoch of the mind in simple opposition to a current less ideal epoch;

2. That it represents resistant practices of technologies of spirit simplistically as capable of neutralizing chaos and creating the conditions for a peaceful future; and

3. That it understands the intervention of new practises of technologies of spirit primarily in terms of stimulating desire, formulating these terms according to a Freudian terminology that is, in my opinion, both limited and limiting.

Beyond these concerns, the most central problem of the Ars Industrialis project is, however, that it remains content to write about new technologies rather than through them. Its proposed activities include traditional academic media almost exclusively: discussions, symposiums, work-groups, press, journals, books, studies, and experiments. Only once does the manifesto mention the actual use of new technologies, when it discusses publication on the internet, but it limits the scope of this kind of publication to the organization’s own website. At no other point does the possibility of conducting academic work through new technologies of spirit even arise, not in the entire manifesto. At all other times, new technologies of spirit remain objects for study only, this despite the assertion that these technologies hold the potential to usher in a new epoch of the mind.

This refusal of a particular academic community to conduct its work through the new technologies of spirit is symptomatic, I think, of the broader academic community’s general failure to make use of the technologies available to it in any real way, particularly in the kind of resistant and critical ways that are required if these technologies are not to become completely dominated by the influence of the market. It is necessary that there be a concerted and sustained effort from those who are concerned with the life of the mind to write and think and work in critical ways through the new technologies of spirit themselves. This is necessary, not only because it is the only way that the voice of the academy will regain a role of relevance to society more broadly, but also because this kind of critical intervention should be the primary role of the academic in every society in every era, no less now than ever.

I promised some months ago that I would write a series of posts on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as I reread it and took notes from it, but I have always seemed to have more pressing topics at hand, and I find myself having finished my second reading of the book without having posted about it at all. I am not entirely without consideration for those who may be reading this, so I will not now try to write in one post all the things that I should have written in several, but I will follow one series of ideas that impressed me with their relevance to the internet as a means of social interaction.

Debord argues that the dominant mode of production speaks a language of spectacle that comes to mediate social relationships, transforming the prevailing mode of social life so that it appears as spectacle itself and seems to justify the language, the conditions, the aims, and the products of the existing system. The society of the spectacle is thus a society where social life is mediated in such a way that it can be produced and consumed as a product, where social life becomes increasingly subject to an economy. The power of spectacle over the individual, therefore, is a function of the individual’s acceptance of the economization of social relationships, which means that resistance to the society of the spectacle will always take the form of a resistance to the economization of social relationships.

This argument, even in the reductive and inadequate way that I have summarized it, bears interestingly on the phenomenon of social media networks and other means of social interaction through the web. These technologies function in precisely the way that Debord describes. They impose themselves between people in order to mediate their relationships with a series of images and spectacles that are designed, explicitly, to reduce the elements of social interaction to forms of data that can be digitized, transferred, measured, economized, and controlled. Rather than having a series of complex and unique relationships, for example, these technologies reduce everyone to friends, to a number on the screen that can be counted and compared with others, to a collection that can be amassed like possessions and counted like currency. Rather than having my own complex identity, I am forced to choose my religion, relationship status, and everything else from options limited by drop-down menus. My life, the lives of my friends, and the relationships that we have between us become reduced to a spectacle, to a product for our consumption. Rather than living our social relationships, we consume them for our amusement, in the sense of amusement that I defined some time ago.

I do not mean to imply that that all social relationship conducted through these technologies is necessarily produced and and consumed as spectacle in support of the dominant modes of production, but I do mean to imply that this is indeed very often the function of these technologies when they are used uncritically. It is necessary, therefore, that we be actively looking for ways to use these technologies against themselves and to conduct ourselves through them in ways that contest their tendency to reduce social interaction to measurable data, to economy, to spectacle, to consumption. We need to approach these technologies, not in order to use them, but in order to misuse them, in order to abuse them, so that we can begin to resist their function as spectacle as far we are able.

This abuse and misuse would, of course, look different from person to person and from situation to situation, but it will be possible to develop, refine, annd share techniques for this kind of intervention, not just with web technologies, but with any of the technologies that have come to mediate human relationship.  In my own use of the web, for example, I habitually decline to use drop-down menus or, when I must, I select options that are clearly untrue of me.  I complete forms in ways for which they were not intended.  I use softare to block advertizements.  I write and read the web at length.  I try to do both critically.  I avoid the viral.  I revel in the idiosyncratic.  I try to use means of communication that permit greater flexibility and choice. None of these choices makes much of a difference to the web itself, but they do make a differance in the virtual place that I create for myself from the web.  They allow me to limit the mediating influence that these technologies might have on the relations that I conduct through the web.  I hope they are a place to start.

One of my friends, who prefers on principle to remain anonymous to the web, asked me yesterday about how exactly I go about writing for the web.  She is, and I hope this does not threaten her anonymity too much to say so, a teacher of writing and composition, and she is interested to know how it is that writing in the mode of a blog, or in other web modes, differs from more traditional writing practises.  She claims that writing for the web can be paralleled most closely to the tradition of the personal essay, a form that is strongly connected to print journalism in various forms, and her hypothesis is that it may be productive to compare the writing style of print journalism at the height of its influence with the writing styles emerging in new media journalism today.

I am not sure if my responses helped her very much, but our conversation did cause me to spend some time thinking about the process through which I come to write in this space.  What I realized is that writing for the web, at least my writing for the web, may indeed resemble the personal essay in function and even at times in form, but that it is a mode of personal essay that intensifies the personal to extremes that would rarely have been possible in print journalism.  This is the case even in my own writing, and I am someone who consciously limits the amount and the nature of the personal information that I include.  It is this intensification of the personal, this intensification of personality, that I think is a key marker of writing for the web, so I though that I might explore the reasons why my own personality has accorded so well with tthis mode of writing.

What I realized, in effect, is that I enjoy the nature of writing for the web because I am not a focussed thinker.  I never have been.  This was true even when I was under the duress of having to perform in the academic institution.  It is still truer now that I have little external direction for what I need to think and read and write.  At any given time, I am thinking through several problems having to do with a whole range of activities, from gardening to teaching to philosophy to whatever.  A short list at the moment, for example, would include the following questions, some of which will very likely provide the source for future writing in this space or elsewhere:

1.  What is the nature of home on the web?  What does it mean to be at home in virtual spaces?

2.  How exactly might I create a physical barrier around the corner of my yard that would protect the garden that I want to plant without blocking the view of the house?  Might it be possible to do this in a way that would integrate the barrier into the garden in a productive way?

3.  How might it be possible to encourage spiritual community in the home or the neighbourhood as a way of contesting and resisting the homogenizing influence of church institution?  Can something like this be conceived that would not immediately become a church institution by another name?

4.  What are the ways that I might pattern a reading practise to my students that would model an appreciation for the classic literature that we are studying precisely in terms of reading contemporary culture?  How do I contextualize this kind of reading historically?  How to I represent its significance personally?

5.  How will I schedule this fall’s canning around our new household rhythms?  When might I pick and prepare and cook without interfering with with my Mother-in-law’s physiotherapy practise, with my increasingly napless children, with my family time, and with my activities outside of the home?

This is only a very partial list, but it gives a sense, I hope, of the unfocused nature of my thinking, which is directly related to the unfocused nature of my living.  I am interested in many things, so I think about many things.  I do not have, not in sufficient quantities, the capacity for the kind of sustained and focused writing that is required in traditional academic work.  I recognize this and am not terribly disappointed by it.  What I need is a mode of writing that enables me to write on the various things that interest me, but in a way that also enables me to return to these things, as I will, building a broad and integrated writing and thinking rather than a narrow and isolated writing and thinking.

My process of writing for the web, therefore, as I said to my friend yesterday evening, is not very different from my natural and personal process of living and thinking and being.  What I write is personal in this sense, though it does not always take the form of the essay or always include personal content.  It appears best on the web because the web enables precisely this kind of personal writing, this kind of personalization.  While there may some similarities between current writers of the web and the old personal essayists, therefore, the very personalization that the web allows, and the variation that this personalization allows in turn, will mean that there will also be a great number of dissimilarities.  The web does permit and encourage writing in the mode of the personal essay, but it also permits and encourages writing in very different modes, because it is open to the personal and the idiosyncratic.  This may be, in my opinion, one of the web’s greatest strengths.  It is certainly one of its greatest attractions to me.

Earlier this afternoon I posted on Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We May Think“, an article that discusses the future of information technology from the perspective of a scientist in 1945.  It was for me one of those fabulous little discoveries that are the product of actually reading the web, and it has many elements that I would like to discuss beyond what I will be able to say in this and the previous post, but I will just strongly encourage people to read it for themselves and let these two posts be sufficient.

My favourite portion of Bush’s essay comes from the section where he is imagining a machine that might in the future enable people to manage what would essentially be digital libraries. The machine he imagines is very much like the personal computer, and the management system he imagines is like a personal internet, complete with hyperlinks, which he calls associative indexing and understands to be a more linear set of associations between texts.  These texts are all joined by a set of keywords, something like a tag system, and the texts can be joined by these words into any number of trails or paths through the mass of information that is the virtual library.

He then describes the function of the researcher in this new made of reading and writing, saying, “There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master [will become], not only his additions to the world’s record, but [...] the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

I love the metaphor of the trailblazer here, and its connotations have much to recommend it, so I cannot resist applying it in the context of the internet, which Bush only partially foresees.  The trailblazer is one who identifies a trail by leaving visible marks or blazes along the way.  The path that is marked is not necessarily the only one, because the choices of the trailblazer are to a certain extent personal and idiosyncratic, but in every case there is left a definite trail, leading from one point to another in order to facilitate others in making the same journey. Further, the word ‘blaze’ is from the same root as the word ‘blazon’, which means, in heraldic terms, a personal mark or arms that identifies the bearer.  Incorporating both senses, the trail-blazer is the one who marks a path for others to follow and who marks it with a sign that identifies the one who has made it.

In terms of the internet, I imagine a way for people to mark their paths through the web, not just the random wanderings that they happen to make as they explore the forest, but the habitual and useful paths that they discover by means of these wanderings, the pathways that might enable others to walk behind them.  Just as with a physical path, these digital pathways would never be essential or absolute.  Quite the opposite, because they would also identify the one who had made them, they would always be recognizable as a personal and idiosyncratic trail, but one that the trailblazer found valuable enough to mark and to share.

I do not know if the technology to do something like this exists already, but it should.  It should be possible for me to establish my own trails, my own links through the web, rather than relying on the links that others have made for me.  It should be possible for me to share these trails with other people and to follow the trails that others have made.  It should be possible for me, not merely to track where I have been, but to track my favourite paths, to take others along these paths with me, and to have others, even those I may never meet, follow the blazes that I have left behind me. These things should be possible because, as Bush’s argument implies, in a world as full of information as ours is, contributing to knowledge has as much to do with finding ways through the information as it has to do with adding to it.

I came across an essay yesterday as I was reading the web: “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945.  Bush’s central concern in the article is to encourage scientists, who had worked so well together in support of the war effort, to continue their collaboration in more peaceful endeavours, particularly in the area of information technologies, which he predicts will become increasingly significant.  While he is unable, of course, to foresee the exact technologies that will enable the rapid changes in human relationships to information, he is remarkably perceptive in his understanding that these changes will produce a continual reduction in the size of information, a rise in technical languages to facilitate this reduction, the introduction of artificial information readers to make this reduced information humanly readable, and the use of recording technologies in cybernetic ways, among other things.

The article is worth reading as a whole, not least because it provides such an interesting insight into how the immanent information revolution was beginning to appear even in 1945, but I want to focus on a single phrase, by no means central to the essay, but interesting to me nevertheless.  Midway through the article, in a section focussing on the processes that occur between data collection and the production of new knowledge, Bush says, “For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.”

What I think is interesting here is not the idea that creative thought or even mature thought, however Bush would define this, might be performed by a machine, which is now a science fiction commonplace, but the idea that the functions of the machine might be considered a substitution for these kinds of human thinking.  Here, as with some of his other predictions, I think that Bush is not a little prescient.  Whether or not he recognizes what he is predicting, he correctly projects that machines would not only perform the function of human thinking but become a substitute for that thinking as such.

Let me clarify the distinction I am making.  It is one thing to have a machine that is capable of performing certain kinds of thought.  It is another thing to have a machine begin to substitute for that kind of thought entirely, to perform it so effeciently that human thought ceases to perform this kind of thinking on its own because it allows itself to become substituted by the machine and dependent on the machine to perform these modes of thought in its place. For example, it is now the case, not only that calculators are capable of solving complex mathematical functions for me, but that they have replaced the necessity for me to do so, and have therefore replaced the necessity for me to learn to do so.  The calculator has become, for most people, an absolute substitute for complex, or even not so complex, mathematical calculation.

This is not the only example of this phenomenon, of course. I might also talk about the grammar and spelling checkers that are now a part of virtually every textual interface that I use, and there are many other examples as well.  The post interesting extension of this idea to me, however, is how the mode of thinking that has before now been called research has become increasingly performed by machines, almost by necessity, and has increasingly come to substitute for my own thinking in this mode.  Google is the obvious example in this respect, but there are many others, one or more for almost every digital task that I perform, from searching the files on my own computer to searching routes on my GPS map system.  The increase in data that digitization permits has necessitated machine search, and this in turn has forced me to abdicate my own thinking, at least in certain ways.

This is significant, I think, because there are many ways, many systems, many processes by which I might conduct my research, and these different approaches are completely capable of arriving at different results.  So much is obvious.  It should also be obvious that the range of research approaches available to me are limited by the tools that I use, along with other things, like disciplinary conventions and existing methods for organizing and cataloguing information.  To some extent, therefore, the mode of thinking that is operative in research has always been limited, but it has not until now become substituted like it has become substituted by the search engine.

Virtually all research now begins through the search engine.  It is the only practical place to begin in the face of the vast amounts of information now available to the researcher. Yet, search engines are coded to produce results according to certain criteria, most of which remain hidden from the researcher, and many of which are not helpful to serious research.  To use Google again as the obvious example, the ranking of pages based upon the number of links to them and other such quantitative criteria produces a list of hits that is based more on popularity rather than on utility for any particular purpose.  This kind of approach obviously privileges sites that are longstanding, easy to understand, visually appealing, or associated with powerful offline interests, rather than those that are most accurate or most thorough.  While there are many exceptions to this privilege, and while there are ways to refine searches to make them more reflective of other criteria, it remains that the structure of the search engine itself has begun to perform the thinking of research as well as the function, has begun to substitute for this kind of thinking for most people.

Again, none of this is profound.  Many have remarked at how scholars today have become more data miners and data analysts than researchers properly speaking, and this shift probably reflects a felt need resulting from the sheer amount of data that is being produced.  What it means to me, however, is that we need to start thinking critically about the kinds of programs, scripts, and algorythyms that produce our data.  To the degree that we allow machine thinking to substitute for human thinking, and this substitution is becoming increasingly unavoidable in many areas, it is imperative that we cede these modes of thought with caution and with a constant critical attention to the codified assumptions on which machine thinking is based.  We need to maintain an awareness of the limits and the limitations of the thinking that machines are performing for us, even as we take advantage of the possibilities that this thinking enables.  In some cases, we may also need to find alternative ways, either traditional or innovative, to counteract these limitations. To do otherwise is to risk limiting our thinking in ways that are intellectually dangerous.

I had dinner and coffee with Dave Humphrey last Thursday night. Our conversation was productive of several things that I have not yet found the time to discuss in this space, and, unfortunately, I will probably not have the time to discuss them until after I return from vacation this coming week. However, one of the things we covered did motivate me to accomplish something this week.

I have been for several weeks wrestling with exactly how to manage my internet research, and I have written about this process in the past. Dave and I were thinking about this particular problem last Thursday, and Dave encouraged me to begin by using and abusing what I already have at hand. It occurred to me suddenly that I might be able to use my LibraryThing catalogue to perform at least some of the media management functions that I need. LibraryThing is primarily intended to catalogue books, of course, not online media, but I have already been abusing this intention somewhat by including my collection of video and music in my catalogue as well, though this has not always been well received by some of the site’s other users. I decided to experiment a little to see exactly what LibraryThing could or could not do for me. The results, while certainly not ideal, are certainly functional.

I have made only eight entries so far, and I have tagged them all, at least temporarily, as Online materials, so that I can easily access them as a group. The deficiencies of the program for my purpose, as I have discovered them so far, are as follows, in no particular order:

1) The Add Book form does not automatically support links, so the links have to be manually html tagged.

2) The Comments section of the Add Book form, though the best place for including marginalia, cannot really support lengthy commentary without expanding entries vertically to unwieldy sizes in the list view.

3) The Publication section of the Add Book form, though the best place for including links, cannot really support lengthy url’s without expanding entries horizontally to unwieldy sizes in the list view.

4) There is no way to differentiate between different sorts of tags to describe an entry’s medium (online, video, avi), to list some of its keywords (media, spectacle, visuality), or to assign it a group (course ID, research projects, interest groups). All of these things must be accomplished with the same set of tags.

There are, however, some benefits of the program:

1) It automatically integrates the online materials that I am using with my offline materials so that I can more easily group and connect these things to each other.

2) The tagging system is simple and robust enough that I can use it to do accommodate everything I need, even if i cannot make higher order groups of these tags.

3) The site supports groups of users, which will enable some of the resource sharing that I would like, though this would necessitate others using the program for the same purposes.

4) The site supports easy export of data, so that I can port the information elsewhere if I discover a better alternative.

For the time being, therefore, I intend to use LibraryThing to manage my media, but I intend to do so in conjunction with the other things that I have at hand online, my courseware site and this blog, which are much more useful for things like facilitating discussion and for publishing than LibraryThing can be. I am taking this approach, not because it is ideal, but because I am beginning to see the value in using the tools that I already have if they will do. Dave keeps telling me that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and I think that the online tools I have already may be good enough to serve until I can find a solution that will be more perfect.

I have just finished my first reading of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and have just begun my second, so I will probably be posting on it frequently over the next few weeks. Debord published the text, one of the seminal works in the study of media, in 1967, and it came to prominence during the now almost mythical events of 1968, when student protests in Paris instigated a general strike and eventually toppled the governing party of Charles de Gaulle.

The text is organized into numbered sections, some very short, almost aphorisms, and some considerably longer. The sections are grouped together into chapters that circulate around larger themes or arguments, and the sections are arranged such that a chain of argumentation can usually be reconstructed, though this chain is not always explicit. The first few chapters deal almost exclusively with the function of spectacle in society. The later ones are more concerned with analyzing certain trends in Marxist theory and with defining an alternative perspective that has become associated with a movement called Situationism.

There is little in the later chapters that interests me. In my limited experience, any discussion that begins to analyze the relative merits of the various Marxisms leads nowhere, or, more accurately, leads almost everywhere but to nowhere useful, to an endless list of parties, theories, figureheads, congresses, manifestos, and splinter groups. While the analysis of this mess seems to be the favourite occupation of every imaginable brand of Marxist intellectual, it only bores everyone else.

The first few chapters of the text, however, explore the questions of social visuality, mediation, and specularity in ways that are interesting and provocative. There is something blunt, almost aggressive about Debord’s thinking. Though I have reservations about some of his conclusions, many of his observations strike me as true and worth reexamining in the context of our contemporary culture. It seems to me that his ideas about how the spectacle mediates social relationships have perhaps never been more relevant, and I intend to discuss some of these ideas as I have the opportunity.

I was speaking with an old university friend of mine, and she asked me why I seemed to be so interested in media lately. She noted, accurately, that this subject had never been of interest to me during my time as a student, that I had, in point of fact, steadfastly refused to take any more courses than necessary in areas like media studies, post-colonialism, gender studies, or anything else that was considered current and popular in the literature department at the time. Why, she wanted to know, was I now seemingly so determined to make myself an expert on the subject.

Let me be clear. I am by no means an expert on media, and I have no intention of becoming one, but the question was a good one. I had never really reflected on these changes in my interests, never even fully realized the degree of these changes, until she forced me to think in these directions. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with me, I did not have a satisfying answer for her at the time. My best answers always come to me far after the questions that instigated them have been withdrawn. Upon later reflection, however, I think I now understand both why I have become so much more interested in media issues and why I did not really notice this development in me as it was occurring.

What I realized is that my interest in media is not in media as such but in media as an extension of my interest in the nature of ethics, family, friendship, community, and the home. I have not been dedicating increasing amounts of time to the study of media as an end in itself, but to media as an unavoidable fact of our contemporary culture and, therefore, of that culture’s understanding of the questions that do matter to me in and of themselves. What I have been recognizing unconsciously is that our culture cannot be understood apart from the media that increasingly construct and constitute it, that I cannot understand the nature of family and the home in our culture without understanding the media through which these things are formed. It would be nonsensical to talk about friendship or community in our current culture without reference to the function of social media sites, text messaging, and cell phones. It would be ridiculous to talk about family and the home without reference to television, computers, and game consoles.

It is the effects of these media that interest me, as I use them and as I see others using them, as they develop and as I see us develop to use them. The influence of these media and these technologies, the speed with which they change and with which they change us, constitutes the most significant constitutive factor on our culture of family and home, friendship and community, ethics and theology. We need to understand these things if we are to understand ourselves in the culture they create. This is why I find myself thinking media, more and more.