From Word To Word

Well, those of you who are foolish enough to be reading along at home will realize by the sudden absence of today’s posts that my experiment in using the blog to manage my online research has been terminated only a few hours into its existence. When it began to feel unweildy after the first five posts, I knew that there was nothing to be done but to end it before I wasted any more of my time and energy.

Still, I am left with my problem unresolved. I need a way to manage internet research. I need a program that keeps track of the various blog posts, videos, podcasts, discussion threads, and static content that I would like to reference. I need a way to have others contribute their own discoveries to this mess. I need a way to select the ones that interest me. I need a way to link to these resorces, to group them, to comment on them, to attach files and addenda to them. I need a way to share some of these grouped media with classes and discussion groups and friends. I need someone with the programming ability make this happen.

What I want does not exist, and I need help to make it exist. Any ideas would be welcome.

I spent much of yesterday searching the internet for people who are writing about media, not primarily as technicians or as users, but as critics. I was looking for those who are undertaking to ask questions about the social, ethical, cultural, political, and philosophical implications of what I will consent to call “new media” until I have a chance to explain why I think there are better terms available to us. Unfortunately, my search was mostly unproductive. I did come across some individual articles that were very interesting, usually from blogs focusing on social media or on the economics of online media, but I found very few people who are actually focused in any serious and sustained way on the questions that I am asking.

This does not mean, of course, that these people do not exist online, only that I have not discovered them, but I have to admit a certain amount of disappointment with the online community of writers I have read so far. There is much that debates the comparative merits of the newest social media site or the latest plugin for blog software, much that discusses the finer technical points of creating, managing, and using online media, and much that explains how to advertise, leverage, and monetize this media, but there is so little that actually takes the time time to ask the serious questions about the broader functions and implications of media in our society.

During my search, however, I did encounter one blog, authored by Alexander van Elsas, that is asking some questions in directions that are interesting to me. I had intended to introduce him here by discussing an article he wrote on television as a social medium, but his post this morning on instant access caught my attention, so television will have to wait.

Van Elsas’ argument is essentially that there are limits to the desire for instant access and that, once this desire becomes sated, there will be a partial return to slower media. His position hinges on the assumption, which I think is accurate, that most information is not urgent. While it may be very important to know as soon as possible about certain political or economic news, and while it might be very desirable to know as soon as possible about certain entertainment or social news, most information does not require or gain from increased immediacy. As the novelty of immediacy as such wears off, therefore, it may very well be that people begin to consume certain kinds of information in ways that are slower and more measured, even if these slower media are not the ones that we have used traditionally.

I think that Van Elsas’ argument can easily be validated by real practises in the world. Most people who take a newspaper no longer do so as a way to get the most current news, because the newspaper very obviously does not play this function any longer, though it certainly did at one time. People take a paper in order to take their news more slowly, over a cup of coffee in the morning on the front porch. I certainly use books for this very reason. Though I have a large collection of etexts, and though I make use of online etexts when I am doing research, I most often choose to order the physical book, sit with it in my hand, and read it at my leisure. It is not that I could not obtain and read the text more quickly through electronic means, it is that I would gain nothing by this additional speed. The reading of most texts does not require or benefit from instant access.

This is not to say that a recognition of the value of slowness necessarily implies a return to these older media, though I think that it will mean the continuance of some, particularly the book, much longer than many people predict. Recognizing the value of slowness should also mean a careful consideration of how new and emerging media might be used in slower, more careful, more deliberate, more reflective ways. To some extent this is what I am trying to do through this current medium, but broader opportunities for this kind of approach exist within the media themselves. What is required of me is to use media at my personal pace rather than at its maximal pace, to proceed with precisely the speed or the slowness that the moment and the task require, to resist the impulse to move more quickly simply because it is possible to do so.

Let me close by reflecting for a moment on the idea of immediacy itself, one that van Elsas uses throughout his post, and one that I have been using also, because this idea opens up a paradox in our discussion of media, a paradox that bears on the possibilities of developing and using media in different directions than they are being developed and used currently. Immediacy actually describes a state where there is an absolute lack of media and mediation. When something is immediate, it literally means that it is without any kind of medium through which it becomes mediated. There is, therefore, a certain irony in the drive to make media become immediate, because this drive is literally the drive to remove media from media, to make media so perfect that it disappears altogether.

This drive is, of course, always destined to failure. No matter how instantaneous a medium is able to transmit its content, it will always remain that the medium and the transmission were there, were operative, were mediating the content in ways that are unavoidable. What the drive for immediacy eliminates is not the medium as such, but only the visibility of the medium. It does not remove the effect of mediation, but it allows us to forget this effect, to maintain the illusion that the medium has disappeared, that our access is live and untransmitted.

A recognition of the value in slower media, therefore, is connected with a recognition of the paradox’s of immediacy. To slow my consumption of information is to recognize again the reality and the unavoidability of media as such. It is even to revel in the unavoidability of this mediation, the smudges of newspaper ink on the fingers, the smell of a book long closed, the sight of a message more than 140 characters. It is to dispel, even if just for a moment, the illusion that what I see and hear and read and know is immediate. It is also, for this very reason, a place from which the illusion of immediacy can be questioned and critiqued.

Through a series of events too tedious for me to relate and for anyone else to hear related, I have become interested in the question of how to develop or encourage or create online educational communities that would both make use of the new media that are available and also study this usage self-reflexively. What I want to see is the study of media expanded beyond the various academic and technical disciplines in which it is now confined into a wider and more integrated community of teachers, learners, writers, thinkers, practitioners, and researchers. I want this community to be a place where various media are themselves used to do the work of studying and critiquing media. I want it to encourage people to think media through media and to discover what might happen.

I find myself confronted, however, by the technical aspects of the project. The problem is that I have not yet discovered the medium, if it even exists, that would allow me to form the kind of community that I am imagining. The best option, at least initially, would likely be to use or misuse an existing tool to approximate what I want, but I do not know of a program that would even do this much. I have both blog software and Moodle courseware already available to me, but both of these approaches seem unsatisfactory for any number of reasons. The other option would be to have a tool written specifically for my purposes, but the costs involved would be substantial, even if I did have a clear idea of what this tool would look like, which I do not.

What I am realizing, and not for the first time, is that the things I most want are often the things that do not yet exist. I am not interested in the connections that are made through Facebook or Twitter or Digg, however interesting and useful these sites may be in their way. I am not interested in the connections that are not made through academic and educational websites that are basically textbooks by other means, though I have often made use of these resources. I am not even all that interested in the connections that are made through courseware websites, though I maintain such a site and make extensive use of it.

What I want are spaces where people connect over the work of the intellect, but this work is too often done behind the boundaries of institutions, disciplines, and intellectual property. Knowledge becomes hoarded behind these boundaries, so that careers can be advanced, and accolades won, and royalties received. Rather than forming the basis for a living community, the work of the intellect becomes the basis for disciplinary territorialism, political wrangling, and intellectual isolation. The space and the community that I want do not exist. I hope, however, that their prototypes do exist, scattered wherever they may be across the media landscape, and it is my intention to see if they can be gathered.

Several months ago, just before I began writing this pseudo-blog, I began experimenting with the wiki format on my courseware website. I wanted to see what writing through that medium would look like, with all of my writing, even abandoned drafts and nonsense pieces, in one place, linked loosely to one another, changing and adapting as I worked with them. It was my hypothesis that this kind of format would allow the different genres, styles, degrees of completion, and individual purposes of my writing to inform each other more fully, so that I might have a better sense of my own practise, my own strengths and weaknesses. I was also hopeful that the ability of the wiki to keep old versions would give me an understanding of my process.

The experiment seemed initially successful. I posted a small number of selections from as wide a variety of my writing as a could, choosing pieces that were short and could be incorporated quickly. I began to link between them in a tentative way, trying to get a sense of what sorts of links would be useful to me as the wiki grew. This initial success continued even once I began writing in the blog format, when I began dumping selected posts into the wiki as well. However, as soon as I began to try and write new material through the wiki, I began to encounter some difficulties.

The very functions that I thought would enable me to understand my writing better actively distracted me when I came to the actual task of writing. I felt overly conscious of the versions of what I was writing, because they too would be available for others to browse, would become part of the work, like a palimpsest, but many layers deep. I also found myself concerned by the kinds of connections that a piece should have to the other texts on the wiki, since it quickly became clear that these too would become part of its literary structure. By making these allusions formal, by forcibly directing them to the readers’ attention, I was privileging them in ways that made me uncertain. It was not that I felt that it was wrong to determine these elements, because writing is always precisely this kind of determination, but I was so unfamiliar with this kind of writing that I was unable to make these choices in an informed way. In short, I spent more time thinking about how the medium was forcing itself onto the writing than I did doing the actual writing.

While these more or less theoretical distractions were certainly interesting, and I do plan to return to some of them in greater detail, I was not getting any writing accomplished. I found that I was drifting back to my old practises just so that I could progress, and I stopped using the wiki at all except to remove spam edits and make an occasional blog update. In any sense related to my writing and thinking it became almost entirely useless. So, I have decided to let the wiki die. I will not delete it entirely, because a fair amount of time and and work went into its creation, and I have learned by too frequent experience that what seems like garbage in the present sometimes finds a purpose for itself in the future. I am, however, putting it into storage, as it were, and I have no immediate plans for it.

Even so, I am more convinced than ever that wiki tools are capable of producing some interesting intellectual and artistic effects in writing. Though I found the medium to be difficult in some ways, and though I do not have the time or the energy to persevere through this difficulty at the moment, there is an opportunity there to do something that is at least novel and perhaps even useful, if any one is so inclined.

I was very disappointed in Miseducation, a collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays supposedly on education. The book is edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo, and represents itself to be an analysis of schooling and education, which is why I bought and read it. I am very interested in how education, learning, schooling, teaching, curriculum, and pedagogy function in political and cultural terms. I was hoping that Chomsky would be able to contribute something significant to my thinking of these questions.

Instead, by far the greater part of the volume addresses issues of media misinformation, one of Chomsky’s most common, if perhaps also most necessary, themes. It is only the first two essays that speak to the question of schooling and education directly, and only the first that does so in any sustained way. What there is about education specifically is what you would expect of Chomsky, that is, schools play a central role in maintaining a system of control by socializing students to believe that supporting the interests of those in power is necessary to survival. So far so predictable, and perhaps so true, but I could have written as much myself. I had hoped that I would find a deeper and more systematic analysis of the educational system, in the same mode as Chomsky has critiqued the media, but I found instead some tangential remarks that were never developed into a coherent and consistent argument.

Of course, the fault here is not Chomsky’s. He was not the one who gathered these particular papers and chose to publish them under the title of Miseducation. It was not his intention in any of the collected papers to provide the systematic analysis that I wanted and that I was led to expect. The fault here is Macedo’s, whose Miseducation, unfortunately, is mostly a misrepresentation.

This third Sunday of every month is “With the Grain day”, which means that I take the Senior High class to a local coffee shop called With the Grain during what is normally Sunday School time. This gives me the chance to teach important lessons about good coffee and fresh baking, leading by example, of course.

This past Sunday, we were discussing some of the things that I raised in a recent post on Energy, Equity, and Encounter, issues related to walking and the opportunity to encounter those who live around us. I added to this some of the ideas that Jacques Derrida formulates in Echographies of Television, about being at-home, raising the possibility that one of the reasons we do not walk through our neighbourhoods is precisely because we are afraid to encounter our neighbours. Perhaps, I suggested, it is more comfortable for us to have images of our international, national, and communal neighbours broadcast to us through the television and the internet than it is for us to meet them on the street. Perhaps we prefer to stay in our own, home, in our own cars, in our own workplaces, precisely because we fear what an encounter with the other might mean.

One of my students then interjected something that I had never considered in this context before, but that nevertheless bears profoundly on the problem. He pointed out that, even when we are pedestrians in our neighbourhoods, as highschool students often are, we still find ways to prevent us from having to encounter those we meet: the cell phone, the ipod, the blackberry, or whatever, and I agree with this absolutely. I have always been critical of the ways in which these technical devices remove us from others, but I had never interpreted their use as a defence mechanism against the possibility of encountering others as such.

I am not arguing, of course, that all these technical devices necessarily prevent us from encountering others, and I even affirm the ways that they allow us to remain connected to others, though I intentionally contrast the idea of encounter with connection here. I am arguing, however, that the increase of mobile technology allows us to export beyond the walls of the home and the office the ability to isolate ourselves from possible encounter with the other. It extends our ability to replace encounter with connectivity. The ethical implications of this concern me greatly.

Commenting on my recent post, Some Reflections on the Medium, Dave Humphrey suggests that perhaps writing for the web has caused me to trade depth for frequency, though I think and hope that he does not intend this as a criticism. He describes this less deep and more frequent writing as promiscuous, an adjective I often use to describe the way that I read many kinds of text at once without any predetermined program, merely pulling books from my shelf as they surprise my interest. I am interested in these three adjectives, one implied, two explicit: shallow, or at least less deep; frequent; and promiscuous.

I have tended to avoid the metaphor of depth in describing my own writing, mostly because it entails for me an ideal that I do not find appropriate to every situation. Instead, I most often speak of rigour, which implies a metaphor of labour, where the rigorous one is the one who does the work that is required or expected of the job, or I speak of propriety, which implies a metaphor of social relation, where the proper one is the one who does what is required or expected of the relationship. Both of these metaphors appeal to me more because they recognize that depth is not always what is required, that at certain times it fulfils the demands of rigour and propriety to be relatively shallow. By returning me to the metaphor of depth, however, with which I am still uncomfortable, Dave makes unavoidable the fact that writing for the web, at least in this particular mode, has indeed forced me into a relative shallowness. It has limited the number of subjects that I can take up with propriety and rigour. It has forced me to take up improperly and unrigorously subjects that required a depth that I was unable to give them. To this extent, I accept and am troubled by Dave’s use of this word.

I accept with much less reservation his idea of frequency. Not only does it describe accurately how the web enables a much more frequent and therefore open mode of publishing than does the traditional publishing industry, but it bears connotations of the sound or energy wave, which I think are particularly apt. In order for a sound wave to be sent and received, it must be modulated to the proper frequency, and it here that the idea of propriety returns. What the web offers in return for an impropriety of depth, it returns here as a propriety of frequency. I am able to write at the proper speed and with the proper rhythm, with the proper frequency, so that I can hear and be heard. I am intrigued by this idea, and I may return to it as I have more opportunity to reflect on its implications.

Dave’s last suggestion, that my writing for the web is promiscuous in the way that my reading is promiscuous, relates to this idea of frequency also. If what I read is not programmatic, though at times it has this element, and if the films that I watch and the conversations that I conduct and the activities that I perform are similarly without curriculum, if they are promiscuous in this sense, then it is perhaps only proper that my writing be promiscuous also. Perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the web offers me a frequency that is proper to me. Perhaps the rhythm of my reading and my thinking and my life can be best described by this idea of promiscuity. I may need to return to this possibility also.

I appreciated Chris Land’s response to my post on Currency and Incompletion, not only because it raises several interesting questions about writing on the web, which it does, but also because I am glad to have his measured and reflective voice among those contributing to the discussion. I am hopeful that he will agree to contribute on a more regular basis and in a more formal role.

Chris’s comments are particularly relevant to what I have been thinking myself since I met with Don Moore on Wednesday for our weekly discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Echographies of Television. Our Wednesday conversations seem only to perch on the text for brief moments between long migrations elsewhere, so I never had the opportunity to ask Don about a section of the text that relates to his recently completed thesis. Don’s thesis, which explores some of the ethical issues surrounding the rhetoric of 9/11, employs the idea of hauntology that Derrida introduces in Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994). I am by no means confident in writing about this text or about the idea of hauntology, but I was interested, given my conversations with Don, to see that Derrida employs a similar language of ghosts and haunting in his analysis of the media.

In Echographies of Television, Derrida talks about how the “live” image is actually not living at all but a dead image that nevertheless lives on, appearing like a ghost or an apparition, like a spectre that can be summoned, that can be made to appear with the proper incantations. This “simulacrum of life”, as he calls it, is captured by machines that function like “a kind of undertaker”, dividing the present between “its life and its afterlife,” producing images of images that are like spectres, phantasms, and ghosts. While Derrida makes these remarks primarily in regard to visual media, and while he utters them at a time when the internet was little more than an afterthought to media like television, radio, and film, he does assert that this structure of haunting has always accompanied any technical means of inscription, which is to say every means of inscription, including even the most traditional modes of writing. The implication, then, is clearly that the kinds of inscriptions enabled by the internet will be productive of ghosts and spectres also.

For this reason, it was particularly interesting to me when Chris’s comment included a similar concern with issues of media spectrality when he says that he “cannot escape the haunting feeling that there are ghosts encircling our little chat; people whose faces I cannot see, and whose presence I may never truly acknowledge.” Here, Chris seems to be recognizing a kind of ghostliness, not in the dead but still living inscriptions of our conversation, but in the possibility that there are others who do not inscribe themselves but only read anonymously, ghosts who cannot or will not be summoned. This recognition interests me, because it makes explicit a preference for the ghosts who can be summoned, who can be made to speak in one way or another, who can speak for themselves or, perhaps, somehow, for those living ones whose ghosts they are. The preference is for those who are willing to write themselves, despite the spectrality that this involves, rather than for those who are willing to be readers only. The concern is that the ghosts who will not be summoned, who will not speak for themselves, who will not be writers but readers only, may in fact be malevolent, may be haunting us.

I would like to suggest that Chris’s discomfort is not with ghostliness per se, but with something different enough to need a distinct term of reference, something that I might call monstrosity, the possibility that the ghosts who hover invisibly about us as we converse might be monstrous. This rhetoric of monstrosity, of course, already circulates frequently in relation to the internet, found in the fear that the ones I encounter there may be other than what they appear to be, may be pedophiles or terrorists or something worse and always unnameable. This risk of monstrosity is always operative, of course, even when the invisible ghosts allow themselves to be summoned and interrogated, but it is infinitely intensified when they refuse to appear, refuse to speak for themselves.

In these ideas of the ghostly and the monstrous are perhaps also contained the possibilities and risks of the internet more generally. In a sense, my willingness to inscribe myself spectrally in the medium is an invocation, a summoning that calls for the ghosts who circle about me to come forth, to consent to appear and speak to me. This is the fundamental hospitality of the internet, the willingness to summon whomever will come, whomever will consent to come. Even so, in every case, this openness is also an openness to the possibility that this coming will be the coming of the monstrous. My every inscription is a hospitality that risks the possibility that the ghosts it summons may appear as monsters.

Dave Humphrey has recently posted an interesting and thoughtful response to my discussion of Writing for the Web and Echographies of Television, arguing that what I perceive to be the speed and brevity of writing for the web is actually a kind of incompletion that is itself a request for others to join the discussion. I do not like to disagree with Dave, so I am glad that in this case I am in agreement with him. I would affirm that what is best about teletechnologies is their capacity to invite and accommodate the response of others. They enable dialogue and interactivity in ways that traditional media does not, and this is the very reason why I do choose to write through the medium, even though I write in ways that sometimes run counter to some of its tendencies.

When I argue that writing for the web is characterized by speed, brevity, and utility, I am not precluding the possibility that it is also characterized by openness and invitation, and Dave does well to make me recall these aspects of the medium. I am only suggesting that good writing on the web must find ways to disrupt the medium’s obsession with speed and currency, must affirm its possibilities for hospitality, because it is these possibilities, as Dave argues, that enable the web to be such an effective disruption of traditional print media, putting in question traditional ideas of authorship, scholarship, ownership, disciplinarity, etcetera.

The possibility that the web enables, and that Dave rightly affirms, is that we might write and think differently in a public space, without the restrictions of the academic institution or the publishing industry or the physical page. The danger is that the loss of these restrictions will encourage us to stop writing and thinking at all in disciplined ways, in ways that take whatever time and space is required to do their subjects justice.

This afternoon I met with a friend of mine, Don Moore, who has just defended his PhD in English Literature and has just completed his teaching for the semester so is now available to come and entertain me. In preparation for a course he will be teaching in the fall, we have decided to read Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s Echographies of Television (Malden: Polity Press, 2002), which means that I may well be writing on this text off and on over the next few months.

Our conversation today only brushed on the text itself, focusing more on the course that Don is preparing, but we did discuss briefly one of the ideas in the first section of the volume, “Artifactualities”, which is an interview with Derrida. The idea relates to one of my recent posts, “Writing for the Web“, where I suggest that writing for the web is driven primarily by the need for speed and currency. Derrida, speaking more broadly of technological media, which he calls teletechnologies, makes a similar suggestion. He says, “The least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time, or to waste other people’s time there.” This demand for haste, he argues, “can reduce certain intellectuals to silence,” as they “refuse to adapt the complexity of things to the conditions imposed on their discussion.” In other words, the choice before the intellectual is to simplify the complexities of thought to the speed, the brevity, and the utility that teletechnologies require, or to be silent.

I would affirm Derrida’s analysis here, and also his solution, which involves, in part, a decision not to be of this present time, to be anachronistic, untimely, and disadjusted, in order to “not necessarily miss what is most present today.” This mode of writing and thinking in ways that are out of their time and place in order to reveal the question’s that their time and place conceal is exactly what I want to accomplish in this space that is not a blog. I want to write in ways that, while certainly not escaping the teletechnologies that structure and enable it, call attention precisely to the question of how these technologies impose a certain structure and rhythm on public discourse. I want to write slowly and lengthily, so that what I write requests that you read slowly and lengthily, so that perhaps together we can begin to ask what we have lost by acceding to the demand that writing be always in haste, in brief, and in utility.