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 just recently read a summary of Wendy Chun’s book Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, and she confirms an argument that I made several weeks ago, that the web is not actually a space at all and is misrepresented by the spatial metaphors that we use to describe it.  She says essentially that a term like ‘cyberspace’ offers only “a metaphor and a mirage, because cyberspace is not spatial,” and she shows how these metaphors have nevertheless become the basis, nor only of everyday language about the web, but also of regulatory legislation for the web, which perhaps explains why this regulation is often constructed so ineffectively.

At the time when I first suggested that the language of spatiality was inappropriate to the web, I saw the implications of this argument primarily in relation to the possibility of being at home on the web.  However, Chun’s recognition of the legal implications of this language has prompted me to think a little more broadly about the effects of misunderstanding the web as a space.

1.  As I have already argued elsewhere, it encourages an inaccurate conception of how we inhabit or make ourselves at home there.

2.  As Chun indicates, it becomes enshrined in the language of the legal system, and this contributes to the difficulty of developing useful and effective laws to govern the web.

3.  It conceals the real physical structure of the web.

4.  It conceals the fact that the web itself is product and that to use it is in fact a consumption, even if this consumption appears as a kind of participation in production.

5.  It promotes the illusion of mobility and activity through the web, concealing how the web essentially immobilizes its users in front of a monitor, even and especially if that monitor is mobile.

6.  It constructs the web as an alternative to the physical world rather than as an extension of it.

I recognize that this list is probably very partial, but I think that it should go some ways to indicating the effects of a language of spatiality being misapplied to the web.  Our whole social conception of the web is at stake in these kinds of metaphors, and it is necessary that we begin to adopt a language about the web that is more aware of its real physical and social structures.

Though I am perhaps biased because of my own academic background, I might suggest that more appropriate metaphors for the web might be found in the figures of reading and writing.  Not only do these concepts reflect much of the activity that is actually conducted through the web, and not only are they used to perform this function in varying degrees already.  They also have the connotations of production and consumption, of a physical and localized structure of communication, and of the immobility imposed by a medium on its consumer.  Might these textual metaphors also permit a more effective legislation of the web?  Might they encourage a more critical and interpretive approach to the web?  I am interested to know what others might think about these possibilities.

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.

Elexander van Elsas wrote a post several weeks ago on having a home on the web, and I have been reflecting ever since on the idea of what it means to have a home or to be at home on the internet. I may return to some of the directions this thinking has taken me, but I realized last night that there may be a more fundamental problem with thinking about home on the web that must be confronted before we I can even begin to address the kinds of issues that van Elsas is raising: that is, the internet is not actually a virtual space at all.

Let me explain my logic here.  The temptation to think of locality on the web in terms of home is a direct result of understanding the internet as a whole in terms of locality and spacialization in the first place, complete with metaphors of domains, homepages, navigation, and hosting. The web, however, is not a space that I can inhabit, not even virtually, because the web is is a physical space, not a virtual one. It consists of physical networks that relay physical patterns of energy between physical machines. The web as virtual space does not actually exist apart from this physical infrastructure, not until the point where a machine uses the information it has received over this network to create the illusion of a space on a monitor. This virtual space that the machine creates can exist only on the monitor. It exists nowhere else except the monitor. Even seemingly interactive spaces like social media sites and massively multiplayer gaming environments do not exist as virtual spaces on the web, but only in the physical space of the web and in the virtual space of the monitor. The web’s existence as a virtual space is always and only a product of the monitor.

What this means is that the current language of the internet, which relies heavily on metaphors of space and territory, is in fact highly misleading. It implies that the web is a virtual space that I enter and explore, concealing the fact that the web is actually a physical space that I cannot enter but that I use as a tool to create a virtual space at the point of the monitor. I cannot inhabit the web, even and especially in a virtual sense, because it does not exist as a virtual space except as I construct it for myself as such.  Rather than entering the web in any way, I always remain essentially external to it, requesting information from it, creating virtuality with it.

To speak of a home on the web is, therefore, strictly speaking, impossible.  I can only speak of a provisional and temporary home that I create for myself at the point of the monitor so that I may make use of the physical infrastructure of the internet, but this home will always remain entirely distinct from the web, however much it may depend on the web to construct itself.  Understood in this way, the primary change that the web enables in regard to home is not the ability to maintain a personal space within a larger virtual sphere, but the ability to replicate, to recreate, my virtual home wherever I have access to the necessary technology.  My home on the web, recreated for me each time I sit down at my monitor, is now capable of appearing in my physical home, in my workplace, or, as at this particular moment, at a public library in rural Ontario.  Far from creating a stable though virtual home that I can access from anywhere I go, the web forces me to recreate my virtual home everywhere I go, which is perhaps another reason why van Elsas should feel like a refugee.

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.

Some time ago, during one of those conversations that I have wanted to relate here but not had the time, Dave Humphrey and I were reflecting on the parallels between the rise of written text and the rise of electronic text.

Written text. of course, was not always as useful a thing as it is today.  The first alphabetical writing was just a series of letters without any of the textual apparatus that we now take for granted.  There were no spaces between words, no paragraphing, no punctuation.  There were certainly no tables of contents, no indices, no appendices, no footnotes, no annotations.  Without this textual apparatus, reading was an activity for the initiated only.  It took considerable skill and practice to decode written text.  One of the proofs that was given as evidence for the brilliance of Julius Caesar was that he could read without speaking aloud, a technique used by most ancient Roman readers so that they would have audio clues to assist their reading.  Without the textual apparatus that makes reading so natural for most people today, written text remained little more than raw, incomprehensible data.

There are analogies here to the web.  Though the individual parts of the web are readable to most users as text or video or audio, the web as a whole remains largely a mass of raw, incomprehensible data. There are, of course, a number of textual structures that already attempt to provide an apparatus for reading the web.  The search engine is by far the most powerful of these, replacing the static printed index with a flexible generated one.  There are also smaller scale tools that enable me to search the text of a site.  There are tags that let me organize information in databases.  There are bookmarks for the websites I visit.  There are RSS feeds for blogs that I read.  All of these tools make the web more readable.  Without them I would be reduced to the modern equivalent of the ancient Romans, reading aloud, sounding out each word, trying to make sense of what would be little more than a mass of data.

Even with these tools, however, there is much of the internet that we are reading aloud, so to speak, because we still lack the conventions that would make it seem natural to us.  The most recent wave of innovations, mostly having to do with social media and user driven content, has only exacerbated this problem, producing ever greater amounts of data at ever increasing speeds.  Even assuming that most of it is not worth reading, an amply justified assumption in my opinion, it still remains that I need to find and read and connect those bits of the web that really are worth reading, and there is a need for innovative tools that will allow this sort of reading.  There is a need, in short, for a more sophisticated textual apparatus for the web.

I have already mentioned some of what I would like to see myself: programs to manage the content I encounter and ways to map and share the paths that I make as I find my way through the web.  Lev Manovich, in an interview that I will discuss at some later time, talks about mapping cultural flows through the web.  Whatever conventions the web adopts and adapts as it grows, it is these tools that will enable it to be experienced less as a stream of data and more as a comfortable text.  It is these tools on which the usefulness of the web will rely, and we need to be conscious of their significance as we develop them.

I always used to think it odd when Dave Humphrey would talk about honouring the web.  Though I often used the idea of doing justice in similar ways, I could not understand how the web warranted this sort of concern from me, but I am coming to realize more and more that his phrase is apt as a description of how we need to approach the web.

It is the nature of the web, as I have argued previously, to encourage currency and speed, yet to read and write the web in this way is to read and write it only superficially, to ignore the ways that web might be honoured.  One aspect of honouring the web for me is actually taking the time to read what I discover there, resisting the urge to read everything poorly, and encouraging the discipline of reading a few things well.  Rather than simply scanning the results of a Google search or an email alert or a blog reader and recognize bits of information, it is taking the time to read well those things of interest that I discover as I scan those results.  Yet, unless I do take this time, I fail to really honour what has been written there, fail to do justice to what the web is capable of offering me.  In other words, I fail to honour the web.

Let me offer a few examples of the things that I have found just in the last few weeks, things that rewarded the time that I spent to read and reflect on them:

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”

Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, “Werner Herzog in Discussion with Errol Morris”

Lev Manovich, “Database as a Symbolic Form”

Geoffrey Sirc, “Box-Logic”

Bernard Stiegler, “Take Care”

I have written on some of these and will likely write on others.  There are still others that I am currently reading as I find the time. It would have been easy for me to skim these things, register their bare existence, and keep looking for the many other things that the web might offer to my interest.  Every moment that I spent reading and reflecting on these particular texts was a moment that the web was producing others that may well pass me by, some that might even be of use to me.  The temptation is strong, at least for me, to read as quickly as I can, so that I will miss as little as possible, despite the obvious fact that reading in this superficial way will not allow me really to engage with the texts that I have found, will prevent me from really honouring them.

In order to honour the web, therefore, I need to relinquish the idea that I can read it comprehensively, even in the most superficial way, even in the narrowest field.  I have to admit that this medium, or this conglomerate of media, will always write more than I can read.  I have to recognize that reading the web well does not involve reading all of it, or even reading all of it that might be interesting to me.  I have to accept that much of it will pass me by as a necessary cost of the time that I will take to read some of it well.  In other words, reading the web well, honouring the web, is predicated on the recognition that I cannot master the web.  The web makes apparent, what was always true in any case, that I cannot master knowledge.  It presents me with a choice: either to continue chasing an illusory mastery that will drive me to poor and superficial reading and writing, or to accept the fact that I do not master the web, that I only cope with it, and that my proper attitude to it is to honour it by reading and writing it as well as I can.

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 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.