From Word To Word

I have been wanting for some time, at least since the spring of last year, to write something about the nature of what I might call digital encounter, or the possibility of being truly encountered by the digitally mediated other, and I will write this post, I promise, at some point, probably.  I even have a catchy name for it:  “Face to Face in Cyberspace”,  but I have been waiting until I finish Friedrich Kittler’s Literature, Media, Information Systems, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, and Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool,  though I have not yet started reading any of these books after more than a year, so it might be wise not to expect this post too soon.

I had an email this week, however, that relates to this idea of digital encounter, and and I thought that I would take the opportunity to make some preliminary remarks to which I can return when I do finally take up the problem of the digital other more fully, whenever that might be.  So, let me begin by roughly defining what I mean by the moment of the face to face.

The face to face is the moment, not necessarily of encounter wit the other, but of confrontation by the other.  Without this moment of the face to face, the encounter is impossible, but the face to face does not itself guarantee that an encounter will take place.  It is the moment when the other becomes unavoidable to me as an other, but where I have not yet opened myself to the coming of the other, to the approach of the other. It is not a moment that can be measured in time, because the “not yet” of the face to face is ontological rather than temporal.  Since it is ontologically prior to the encounter with the other and to knowledge of the other, it is unconcerned with the other and with encounter and with ethics as such, but it nevertheless makes all of these things possible.

Let me give three examples of what I mean.

James Shelley came to stay with us on Sunday night.  He was biking from London to cottage country, and took the opportunity to stop by our place along the way.  Neither of us have a car any longer, which means that we do not often have the chance to see each other, so it was good to sit on the porch with him and my wife, talking about alternative education and about the potential of charter cities to enable social and ecological change, among other things. Somewhere in the midst of that conversation, Matthew Harrison, a friend and former student, arrived unexpectedly to return a CD, so he joined us for a couple of hours as well.

On Monday night, Don Moore and John Jantunen and I went to see District 9 by Neil Blomkamp, which, incidentally, much exceeded my very low expectations.  We then spent several hours in Don’s backyard, drinking craft beer and talking about film and literature and whatever else.  Our conversation added John Gardner and Roberto Bolano to my list of authors that I really should read and added an interesting chocolate stout to the list of beers that I really should drink more often.

Yesterday afternoon, Tom Able come over for our regular coffee.  We are reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, slowly and distractedly, which is how we generally prefer to do these things.  Our conversation did not remain long on Bonhoeffer, but meandered over Tom’s internship this fall and the course that I am designing for the coming semester.  We mostly talked in the kitchen as I made split pea and ham hock soup.

In each of these cases, there was a moment when I, and those I was with, had to turn from whatever it is that we are doing alongside one another, and we had to face one another, across a table or a porch or a kitchen or a yard, and to become confronted by one another.   We turned from the journey, or the film, or the text, and we saw each other face to face.   We need not have opened ourselves to the others who faced us, need not have made ourselves available to this encounter, but the possibility of encounter could no longer be avoided.  The question of encounter had been posed, and we were made to answer it, in one way or another.

The question is, however, whether this turning toward each other is possible when our faces are mediated, either by the text of a book, or the image of a film, or the code of an application, or the signal of a phone, or some combination of these things.  The answer to this question has traditionally been that no such turning is possible, and certain poststructuralist thinkers have even argued that, since there can be no unmediated knowledge of the other as such, there can be no turning toward the other and no encounter with the other at all.

Though I would myself agree that there is no knowledge of the other that is unmediated, I would affirm another direction in poststructuralist thought that has maintained the possibility of an encounter with the other prior or beyond or otherwise to knowledge and to ontology.  Though this other must therefore remain entirely unknowlable and ungraspable, it nevertheless opens the possibility of an ethical relation with the other.  This implies, at least in my mind, that it must be possible to be encountered in this way, not only by the other in physical proximity to me, by the other who is mediated by my senses and my language and my self, but also by the other who is physically apart from, by the other who is mediated by text and by image and by wavelength and by code, though I do not yet have the language to articulate how this encounter might occur.

This brings me, finally, to the email that I mentioned earlier, in which Dave Humphrey invited David Eaves , Mike Hoye, and myself to join him in an experiment.  He suggested that we read each other’s blogs for a few months and then arrange to meet face to face.  We three invitees do not know each other at all, though we all know Dave, and his invitation certainly creates in me the desire to meet these others face to face, but I wonder whether a moment of the face to face has not occurred already.  It occurred, perhaps, not when I was asked to read two blogs that I had never read before, but when I and three others agreed to read each other for the express purpose of coming to know one another.   Perhaps this decision itself marked a kind of turning toward one another, a kind of looking up into one another’s faces.  It seems to me that this decision causes me to attend to these blogs differently, causes me to be concerned with them in a different way, as if I am no longer side to side with them, as if I am now face to face with them.  I cannot yet speak to this possibility, but perhaps I will be able to do so soon.

This past Saturday the 11th marked the anniversary of my first post, which means that I have been writing this thing that I now confess to be a blog for a little more than a year.  About the time I began, someone told me that the average life expectancy of a blog was something less than three months, and there were perhaps ten inactive blogs for every active one , so I told myself that I would not begin writing a blog unless I could commit to it for at least a year.  At that point, I thought, I would take stock of what the blog had produced and decide whether I wanted to continue it.  The result of that reflection was interesting for me, so I have included it below:

1. As I wrote some time ago, I have found the medium of the blog to accord surprisingly well with the rhythm and pace of my life.  It is adaptable to the many ways in which my other roles distract and interrupt my writing.  I am able to write as a part of how I live in any case.  This has been nothing short of a gift to me.

2. The practise of the blog has come to function, much as writing papers did in school or as my personal correspondence did for some years after, as a way to respond to what I am reading and to articulate what I am thinking.  I need to write in order to think and in order to remember, and this space not only allows me to write in such a way, but gathers what I have written in a kind of archive to which I can easily return.

3.  The site of the blog has become a means for dialogue with some of my immediate social and intellectual community, though much less well than I had hoped.  Many of those whom I had hoped to engage through this medium have not found themselves able to respond through it, and it is a regret to me that my attention to the blog has caused me to reduce the amount of correspondence that I maintain and has therefore lessened the amount that I interact with some of those whom I appreciate most.

4.  In compensation, however, the space of the blog has also connected me with some people whom I did not at all expect.  I began with the thought that I would write for my existing community of friends rather than for the internet in general, but I discovered that, on occasion at least, the internet was reading along as well and was willing to receive what I was writing with the greatest hospitality.  In some instances, these responses have become the basis for ongoing conversations that I value very much.

5.  Writing the blog has encouraged me to write through other mediums as well, to write more often and more broadly.  During the past year, for the first time in my life, I can say that I probably spent as much time writing as I did reading.  This has taken me by surprise, and I am still adjusting to the expanded role that writing has come to play in my daily life.  I have always identified myself as a reader, and I have recently come to identify myself as a teacher also, but I have recently been confronted by the possibility that writing now plays as large a part in my intellectual life as reading and teaching do.  I am sometimes frightened by this.

6.  Writing through the internet has caused me to think more deeply about the nature of the internet specifically and about the nature of electronic media more generally.  The question of how we are mediated by the digital has taken its place among the several questions that regularly recur for me.

7.  The simple practise of writing, broadly, repeatedly, almost promiscuously, has also caused me to think more deeply about the nature of writing itself.  I am increasingly aware of the limits of writing, and yet I am also increasingly aware of how necessary these limits are for me.  Writing has become a way for me to mark, provisionally and tentatively, but also absolutely and authoritatively, above all paradoxically, the limits of myself.

There is probably more that I could say, but I will not.  What I have said already will suffice, I think, to explain why I have decided to continue writing in this way for a little longer yet.  Let us say, at least, though I will commit to nothing further, that I hope to be making a similar address next year.

I received an interesting email today in regard to my most recent post on open conversation. The email was from someone with whom I have exchanged several emails over the past few weeks, and he indicated that he was affiliated with Salon de ver Luisant, the site that had been discussing one of my older posts on expertise and amateurism in a forum that I had been unable to join.

The email made me aware that the site is not absolutely closed to new registrations after all. Though its Register link does say, “This forum is not accepting new registrations,” there is a thread on Registration Issues that provides an email to which requests for registration can be forwarded. This thread is clearly posted on the bottom of the site’s mainpage, though it is not posted on any of the other pages, which merely carry the misleading Register link.

As I was reflecting on this misunderstanding, it struck me that what was required in the situation was something like a gesture of openness on my part. If I would have refused to accept what I thought was a closed forum and had contacted the person who had used my post in the first place, I would have found someone who was not only willing to open a dialogue but one who had opened such a dialogue with me already. Even if this had not been the case, however, even if I had found someone who utterly rejected the possibility of a conversation, this gesture to openness would have been a far more appropriate response in many ways than my post was.

This raises a possibility for me. Though I would still say that an insistence on openness involves a kind of receptivity, a kind of passivity, a kind of availability to the approach of the other, even and especially through digital media, it is possible that certain situations might require a kind of activity that appears as a refusal of closedness, real or perceived. This is not the activity of a response, which encounter with the other always requires, even if it is only required in ways that appear as a passivity. This is an activity that, though it may not be an openness in itself, is a demand for openness, a call for openness, an insistence on openness on the part of the other. It is an activity that does not easily accept a closedness in the other, because it hopes that this closedness may be temporary, or illusory, or failing, and that an openness might appear there after all, against hope.

A week or so ago, I ran across one of my posts on a discussion forum. It had been copied and reposted in its entirety, along with my name and a link to the original post. The discussion was quite interesting, though sometimes critical of what I had written, and I thought that I would add my own comments in order to address some of the questions that had been posed. Unfortunately, the discussion group was closed to visitors, and I was informed, when I tried to join it, that it was not accepting new members. I can hardly overstate my frustration.

It was not that the group had chosen to pursue the discussion on their own site rather than mine. I know that many online writers consider this to be bad etiquette, but I think that there are perfectly valid reasons to begin a new discussion elsewhere rather than to pursue it entirely through a single source site. I myself have used my site to discuss other writing on the web, and I would say that this practise can only encourage the kind of open dissemination that is the greatest advantage of internet media.

Neither was it that the forum had copied my post in full that made me frustrated, because this also accords with what I believe the practise of the internet should be. I have not yet officially released the material on my site through a Creative Commons license, but this is entirely due to my own laziness. As long as my writing is attributed properly and is not being used to make a profit, I have no reservations at all about how people copy, share, and mix it. I firmly believe that this kind of openness is essential to promoting cultural creativity, whether through the internet or anywhere else.

No, what frustrated me was that the discussion was closed, that the conversation was posted publicly but restricted to its private members. To me, this kind of closedness is an affront to the nature of the internet. It takes a medium whose strength is in its capacity for openness and sharing, for dialogue and interaction, and makes it into the same kind of closed dialogue that could exist through any other medium.

I admit that there may be perfectly good reasons to keep a conversation private. I would even say that a good deal of what is posted publicly on the internet should probably remain private. However, to post publicly a closed conversation eliminates the very openness that make the internet function most effectively. It closes rather than opens dialogue. It arrests rather than mobilizes thinking. It paralyses rather than stimulates writing. It fails to encourage what I find most valuable in the internet: the open conversation.

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 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.