Learnin’

From Readership to Thinkership

Kenny Goldsmith (teacher, poet, conceptual writer, radio producer, UbuWeb digital archivist) deserves to have a book written about him (a book that, unlike his, people will read):

My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports “on the ones” (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t. But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I don’t have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called “conceptual writing.” The idea is much more important than the product…

My favorite books on my shelf are the ones that I can’t read, like Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, or The Arcades Project. I love the idea that these books exist. I love their size and scope; I adore their ambition; I love to pick them up, open them at random, and always be surprised; I love the fact that I will never know them. They’ll never go out of style; they’re timeless; they’re always new to me. I wanted to write books just like these. I think you hit it just right when you spoke of reference books. I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing. I think of them as ’pataphysical reference books.

For more on pataphysics (which I don’t think really needs that apostrophe), aka “the science of imaginary solutions,” read this.

I also found this fascinating, especially coming from the man who wrote “If It Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist” (back in 2005):

I’ve made a move in the Luddite direction recently by trying to remove UbuWeb from Google. I want the site to be more underground, more word-of-mouth. The only way you’ll be able to find it is if someone links to it or tells you about it, just like music used to be before MTV. But you’ll still find UbuWeb on all the bad search engines that no one uses: AltaVista, Dogpile, and Yahoo! Again, everyone wants to rush toward the center: they even write books about how to get your Google ranking higher. We’re headed in the opposite direction. We want to get off Google.

But actually, even if you go back to that 2005 essay, it has this gorgeous coda, under the subhed “The New Radicalism”:

In concluding, I’m going to drop a real secret on you. Used to be that if you wanted to be subversive and radical, you’d publish on the web, bypassing all those arcane publishing structures at no cost. Everyone would know about your work at lightening speed; you’d be established and garner credibility in a flash, with an adoring worldwide readership. 

Shhhh… the new radicalism is paper. Right. Publish it on a printed page and no one will ever know about it. It’s the perfect vehicle for terrorists, plagiarists, and for subversive thoughts in general. In closing, if you don’t want it to exist — and there are many reasons to want to keep things private — keep it off the web. 

Something to think about, when you’re too busy not reading.

 

This is how we change / Horizontal loyalty

From Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Journalism School:

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

*snip*

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

This speech makes me want to run around the entire internet, giving a million high-fives.

(via @edyong209, who gets high-five #001)

 

Colleges run by anti-college people

MIT’s Media Lab recently tapped angel investor Joi Ito to be its next director. This was met with a ton of applause from my Twitter feed and folks in the tech press — and everyone zeroed in on the fact that Ito, rather unusually for head of a top university center, doesn’t have a college diploma. 

Silicon Alley Insider’s response sorta sums it up:

It’s a brilliant move, because Ito is not an academic: he attended two colleges but dropped out both times. Instead, he’s an entrepreneur, angel investor (in companies like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter), open source software activist and generally highly regarded tech visionary.

This is obviously a great career move for Ito — there are few more prestigious jobs in tech than the MIT Media Lab — but it’s also a brilliant move from MIT. It recognizes that you don’t have to be an academic, or even a college graduate, to be a great innovator and leaders of other innovators.

I’d definitely agree with the last sentence, and Ito might absolutely be the right pick to run Media Lab. Another story I read talked about his unique ability to enable other brilliant people, arguing that it was rare for people his age, who tend to be focused on their own career. I honestly don’t know enough about him to judge.

But I think it’s weird that the lack of credentials are, paradoxically, being seen as a credential. Universities are freaky places. They don’t work like startups or big businesses, for good or for ill. Maybe MIT Media Lab needs to work more like that. But then it’s helpful to have somebody who knows and is comfortable with university culture to run interference and camouflage what’s happening in terms that the people who still are products of universities (and who, you know, completely outnumber you) will understand.

I’m surprised nobody writing about Ito’s appointment to MIT has referenced John Maeda’s appointment a few years ago as President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda also came from the tech world, outside the academy. He had a PhD, although that wasn’t his selling credential. In fact, he actually came from MIT’s Media Lab! 

Maeda, too, was super-admired by working tech and creative people all over the place. But since taking over at RISD, he’s had a supremely difficult time trying to push change or even handle ordinary business, facing votes of no confidence from faculty, and generally trying to find the right balance between innovating and respecting the existing balance.

President of a college is a much more closed, university-admin-style position than director of a semi-autonomous technology lab within a college setting. Maybe the difference between the two positions will make all the difference. But I’m not sure. Nobody is. 

And even if Ito turns out to be a smashing success, we should be careful about assuming that this is universally generalizable — that talented VCs can just run everything through the sheer power of their awesomeness. It’s not so simple. It depends on the institution, the personality of the new person brought in, and what the leader and institution are able to build together. 

Likewise — (COUGH) — it would be nice if this whole “hey, the skills you need to be successful in the technology world and the skills you need to work really well in the academic world aren’t so different!” sentiment worked the other way, too. People who got those credentials weren’t just wasting their time when they “should have been starting companies.”

Instead of spending their twenties doing body shots, chasing money, or trying to find themselves, people with PhDs were busting their ass working sixty-hour weeks, learning multiple languages, mastering research tools, and learning how to write, edit, and think.

Just sayin’.

 

Why Google Ngrams F—ing Sucks

It’s harder than you might think to use Google Ngrams to actually chart trends in cultural history — or do “culturomics,” as the Science article authors would have it — because of well-known problems with the data set.

Here, Matthew Battles tries (on more or less a lark) to see some history play out, Bethany Nowviskie spots a trend (maybe true, maybe false), and Sarah Werner flags the problem.

Aw, man — that fhit Seriously Pucks.

You know what would actually be pretty cool, though? If it were easier to go one level deeper and use Ngrams to do Google Instant Regression. You could graph trends against well-known noise (other s-words misread as f) AND other trends — or instantly find similar graphs. 

Let’s say the curve of the graph for the f–word in the 1860s is similar to that for other words and phrases — like “ass”* or “confederacy”* — you could correlate language with other language, individual words with stock phrases, and even (using language as an index/proxy) extralinguistic cultural trends or historical events.

Single-variable analysis just doesn’t tell you very much, even on a data set as problematic as print/language. You need systematic data, and better comparison and control capacity between variables, before you can start to do real science.

(* Ignore for the purposes of this example ascribing contemporary historical meanings to these two ambiguous terms.)

 

Film History 101 (via Netflix Watch Instantly)

Robin is absolutely right: I like lists, I remember everything I’ve ever seen or read, and I’ve been making course syllabi for over a decade, so I’m often finding myself saying “If you really want to understand [topic], these are the [number of objects] you need to check out.” Half the fun is the constraint of it, especially since we all now know (or should know) that constraints = creativity.

So when Frank Chimero asked:

Looking to do some sort of survey on film history. Any sort of open curriculum out there like this that runs in tandem with Netflix Instant? 

I quickly said, “I got this,” and got to work.

See, trying to choose over the set of every film ever made is ridiculously hard. Choosing over a well-defined subset is both easier and more useful. 

Also, I knew I didn’t want to pick the best movies ever made, or my favorites, or even the most important. Again, that pressure, it’ll cripple you. I wanted to pick a smattering of films that if you watched any given, sufficiently large subset of them, you’d know a lot more about movies than when you started. 

This is actually a lot like trying to design a good class. You’re not always picking the very best examples of whatever it is you’re talking about, or even the things that you most want your students to know, although obviously both of those factor into it. It’s much more pragmatic. You’re trying to pick the elements that the class is most likely to learn something from, that will catalyze the most chemistry. It’s a difficult thing to sort, but after you’ve done it for a while, it’s like driving a car, playing a video game, or driving a sport — you just start to see the possibilities opening up.

Then I decided to add my own constraints. First, I decided that I wasn’t going to include any movies after the early 1970s. You can quibble about the dates, but basically, once you get to the Spielberg-Scorsese-Coppola-Woody Allen generation of filmmakers — guys who are older but still active and supremely influential today — movies are basically recognizable to us. Jaws or Goodfellas or Paris, Texas are fantastic, classic, crucial movies, but you don’t really have to put on your historical glasses to figure them out and enjoy them, even if they came out before you were of movie-going age. The special effects are crummier, but really, movie-making just hasn’t changed that much. 

Also, I wasn’t going to spend more than a half-hour putting it together. I knew film history and Netflix’s catalog well enough to do it fast, fast, fast. 

And so, this was the list I came up with. As it happened, it came to a nice round 33.

I made exactly one change between making up the list and posting it here, swapping out David Lynch’s Eraserhead for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. I cheated a little with Eraserhead — it’s a late movie that was shot over a really, really long period of time in the 70s and came out towards the end of that decade. And Breathless isn’t Godard’s best movie, but it’s probably the most iconic, so it was an easy choice.

There are huge limitations to this list, mostly driven by the limitations of the catalog. Netflix’s selection of Asian and African movies, beyond a handful of auteurs like Akira Kurosawa, isn’t very good. There’s no classic-period Hitchcock. There’s no Citizen Kane. There aren’t any documentaries or animated films. And you could argue until you’re blue in the face about picking film X over film Y with certain directors or movements or national cinemas. 

But you know what? You wouldn’t just learn something from watching these movies, or just picking five you haven’t seen before — you would actually have fun. Except maybe Birth of a Nation. Besides its famous pro-Ku Klux Klan POV, that sucker is a haul. Happy watching.

 

How grad school is like trying to make the NBA

Here’s my own first experiment with Storify. (See Robin’s here.) I tried to include a fair amount of the back-and-forth that went into it, but omitting some things and time/place-shifted others for readability.

 

Facebook Arabic

The Middle East is anxious about what’s perceived as a decline in Arabic:

[C]alls to forestall the language’s demise are accompanied by cautionary tales about parents who encourage their children to learn other “more useful” languages like English and French, only to find that they can scarcely recite the Arabic alphabet when they get to university. Meanwhile, teachers across the region warn about the rise of “Facebook Arabic,” a transliterated form of the language based on the Latin script. Exemplifying their concerns are the oratorical fumbles of some of the region’s younger political leaders like Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, whose shambling inaugural address to the Lebanese parliament provoked much local tittering. Not everyone is amused: Fi’l Amr, a language-advocacy group, has launched a campaign to raise awareness about Arabic’s critical condition by staging mock crime scenes around Beirut depicting “murdered” Arabic letters, surrounded by yellow police tape that reads: “Don’t kill your language.” 

Really, though, it’s not actually Arabic that’s suffering, but a particular grapholect, fusha, the Modern Standard Arabic that closely resembles the classical Arabic of the Koran. And fusha has always been more of an imagined commonality binding together the Arab world than a reality. 

In a very basic sense, there is no such thing as Arabic; or, at least, there is no single language that all Arabs speak, read, write, and understand. Instead, Arabic is, like English and many other languages, a constellation of various national dialects, regional vernaculars, and social registers bearing different degrees of resemblance to each another. What sets it apart from a language like English is its diglossic nature, whereby the language of literature and formal address (newscasts, political speeches, religious sermons, and so forth) is markedly different, on multiple structural levels, from the language of everyday speech.

You can overstate this, but it’s a little bit like 19th-century Western Europeans watching literacy numbers boom while wringing their hands over the fate of Latin.

As recently as 1970, three out of four Arabs over the age of 15 were illiterate, according to Unesco. Two decades earlier, illiteracy among women was close to 90 per cent. Even in a country like contemporary Egypt – which has long prided itself, as the old saying goes, on reading the books that Iraq writes and Lebanon publishes – less than two-thirds of the population can read. To speak, therefore, of helping restore Arabic to its former glory, or of helping it to “reemerge as a dynamic and vibrant language” as the government of the UAE has recently committed itself to do, is to ignore the reality that Arabic – both in its classical and modern standard incarnation – has never had as many users as it does today. Even taking into consideration the sway that English holds in the private and educational sectors of various countries in the region, or the important position that French occupies in France’s former colonies, it is impossible to pinpoint another moment in the history of the Arab world when so many people could communicate (with varying degrees of ability) in fusha.

This article I’m quoting was written by my friend Elias Muhanna, who blogs about Lebanese politics as Qifa Nabki, and published in The National, then picked up by The Economist. Whoo-hoo! Comp Lit PhDs FTW! 

 

The generative web event

Last week, a bunch of digital humanists got together at the Center for History and New Media to make a new tech tool that the broader academic AND nonacademic communities could use for their work. The catch: they had to conceive, design, and ship the thing in JUST one week. And as anyone who’s spent any time hanging out with university people, the pace is usually pretty glacial compared to the commercial world, even/especially for tech.

They called it “One Week | One Tool,” with a great subhead in the deck: “A Digital Humanities Barn-Raising.” You can see the sweet team that put it together here. And CHNM has a great track record with these kinds of projects: Zotero and Omeka alone are free, open-source world-class products that have made life in the research and curatorial feeds way easier.

Now about half these people working on One Week | One Tool are in my Twitter feed, and they spend a lot of time talking to each other, so as this was unfolding, I read about this event non-stop. People wrote blog posts about it. Folks (especially those of us who were on the periphery) made puns and cracked jokes. It was an ongoing communal broadcast that you could follow on the #oneweek hashtag if you wanted the full dish. It was very, very similar to the excitement around the 48HrMag (now Longshot Magazine) project when it was first announced, albeit within a slightly smaller, maybe more homogeneous community.

But, importantly, with all that information circulating, nobody said anything about what the tool actually was. There were even enigmatic teaser tweets, like “Just used the new #oneweek tool for the first time; works great!” It wasn’t LeBron-taking-his-talents-to-South-Beach suspense, but at a certain point, more and more people were waiting to find out what the heck the thing was. They even launched a video stream to make the announcement. I don’t know if they tried to get ESPN to donate some time and sell commercials for charity, but who knows?

And sure enough, it became big news. Everybody who’d been following it live-tweeted the news once they’d gotten it. (Some people even begged their Tweeple to post it, since they couldn’t watch the video broadcast.) It got written up in ReadWriteWeb, the Chronicle of Higher Educaton, and the Atlantic, among other big-for-DH venues. 

And they put together a great open-source tool: Anthologize, a WordPress plugin that helps you take online content like blog posts and collect, edit, design, and format them into a book — for either digital or print. Solid software, with obvious utility for lots of people, not just academics. (Although part of me quietly wonders if the CHNM’s last big project, “Hacking the Academy,” motivated the choice, since that explicitly was an effort to turn a whole bunch of scattered blog posts — again, all written and/or curated in one week — into a book.)

Now this is the part on Snarkmarket where, usually, I would try to explain what I think all of this means — for you, for us, for media, for journalism, for education, for the children. And this time, I’m deliriously happy, because I think we’ve already done it. I can just take two posts+comment threads from the Snarkmarket archive and blockquote the hell out of them. (And as everyone knows, me and blockquotes are totally BFFs.)

Here are some highlights from Robin’s still-uber-potent “The future of media? Bet on events”:

So far we’ve got this TED/Phoot Camp media-making work­shop spear-gun. Now, bolt on deadly addi­tions from Iron Chef and the Long Now Foundation’s debates. Now we’ve got a laser sword media prod­uct that is:

* Live. It’s an event that hap­pens at a spe­cific time and place in the real world. It’s some­thing you can buy a ticket for—or fol­low on Twitter.
* Gen­er­a­tive. Some­thing new gets cre­ated. The event doesn’t have to pro­duce a series of lumi­nous photo essays; the point is sim­ply that con­trib­u­tors aren’t oper­at­ing in play­back mode. They’re think­ing on their feet, col­lab­o­rat­ing on their feet, cre­at­ing on their feet. There’s risk involved! And that’s one of the most com­pelling rea­sons to fol­low along.
* Pub­lish­able. The result of all that gen­er­a­tion ought, ide­ally, to be some­thing you can pub­lish on the web, some­thing that peo­ple can hap­pily dis­cover two weeks or two years after the event is over.
* Per­for­ma­tive. The event has an audience—either live or online, and ide­ally both. The event’s struc­ture and prod­ucts are care­fully con­sid­ered and well-crafted. I love the Bar­Camp model; this is not a BarCamp.
* Ser­ial. It doesn’t just hap­pen once, and it doesn’t just hap­pen once a year. Ide­ally it hap­pens… what? Once a month? It’s a pat­tern: you focus sharply on the event, but then the media that you pro­duce flares out onto the web to grow your audi­ence and pull them in—to focus on the next event. Focus, flare.

I wrote this in the comments:

I like posi­tion­ing the generative-web-event as being some­where between a sem­i­nar, a TV show, and a magazine. 

Like a sem­i­nar, or work­shop: it’s brainy, and col­lab­o­ra­tive, aimed at cre­at­ing knowl­edge, not just recit­ing it;

Like a TV show: it’s live! It’s hap­pen­ing now! Or, rather — it was hap­pen­ing then. We’re going to show you some­thing that’s going to gain and cap­ture your attention;

Like a mag­a­zine: you’re not cap­tur­ing a ran­dom viewer, who is just try­ing to tune in to what­ever catches their atten­tion at that moment. You’re con­nect­ing with sub­scribers, and try­ing to gain and hold their atten­tion. Too much of the web, of social media, is like flick­ing through the chan­nels, with too much of the bad aspects of that and not enough of the good.

And Shamptonian asks:

Regard­less of the tools, meth­ods and processes involved, I keep wrestling with the exis­ten­tial ques­tion of “what is the ulti­mate pur­pose of this media?”

Are we gen­er­at­ing it:
1. For profit?
2. For atten­tion?
3. For edu­ca­tion?
4. For help­ing human­ity?
5. For the evo­lu­tion of civilization?

I have no answers :) I think I’m just grow­ing weary of hav­ing to assign pur­pose to art, and the increas­ing belief that the forms of [artis­tic] media (poetry, lit­er­a­ture, paint­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, video, etc.) are less mean­ing­ful, less mar­ketable, less ‘social’, if they do not have a broader intent.

Actually, that whole comment thread is one of my favorites ever: it features a goodly chunk of the all-time Snarkmatrix comment all-stars, and we talk about the awesomeness of the Snarkmarket ampersand, the non-value of farts in windowless rooms, and even spawned what’s still my favorite mass-culture media idea, “Lego Hamlet.” Read it, or read it again.

Now, Robin started out his events post thinking about events for profit, but clearly, as Anthologize proves, you can also get a lot of mileage for events that look to educate and help humanity AND — maybe most importantly — generate attention. Here’s Robin again:

A specter is haunt­ing the inter­net, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to pay money. It’s the chal­lenge of get­ting them to pay atten­tion. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, bet­ter, because we as inter­net users and blog read­ers and tweet slingers will have more cool, weird, inter­est­ing stuff to look at all the time, and it will just keep com­ing faster and get­ting cooler and frag­ments and—ack!

So what kinds of cultural objects historically have gotten people to pay attention? Well, I wrote about this last month:

The way our cul­ture works, depend­ing on what field you’re oper­at­ing in, cer­tain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) gen­er­ate more cul­tural focus than oth­ers. Shirky gives an exam­ple from paint­ing: “Any­one can be a painter, but the ques­tion is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ Peo­ple are always look­ing for these high-cost sig­nals from other peo­ple that this is worth­while.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in com­edy, it might be an hour-long album or TV spe­cial; I’m sure you can think of oth­ers in dif­fer­ent media. It’s a high-cost object that broad­casts its sig­nif­i­cance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work…

It’s no sur­prise, then, that he Big Dig­i­tal Shake-Up in the way cul­tural objects are pro­duced, con­sumed, sold, dis­sem­i­nated, re-disseminated, etc. is shift­ing our con­cepts of both author­ship and the work in many gen­res and media. What are the new sig­nif­i­cant objects in the fields that inter­est you? Pom­plam­oose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and com­mu­nity cre­ated by it; and Andrew Sul­li­van some­how man­ages to be the “author” of both the book The Con­ser­v­a­tive Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when some­one else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writ­ing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get peo­ple on blogs talk­ing about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and inter­views about it, so there’s some­thing besides the Ama­zon page to link to. 

I put forward a guess at the end of that post, which is a partial answer to that question. One new kind of media that’s starting to function as a work is a blog. Not, in most cases, a blog post — but a blog. If the New York Times decides, “hey, we’re going to start and host a blog all about parenting” — that blog becomes a Work. It produces ongoing cultural focus, and not just because it’s in the New York Times. Some posts get more attention than others, especially if they cross over into a long-form venue, but writing that blog, sticking with it, being its author, creates focus, readership, and a long accumulation of content. And I’m sure Lisa Belkin (who already wrote a book about parenting) will get another book out of it.

But the other new, emergent work, which might be more radical, is the generative web event. 48HrMag, One Week | One Tool, Robin’s novellas, and maybe even the New Liberal Arts (especially if we put together another edition) are all ancestral species of this new thing — the children of TED and Phoot Camp and Long Now and Iron Chef, and the parents of whatever’s going to come next.

 

Author-functions and work-functions

There are many, many noteworthy things in this interview with Clay Shirky, but this caught my attention (bold-emphasis is mine):

[W]hat we’re dealing with now, I think, is the ramification of having long-form writing not necessarily meaning physical objects, not necessarily meaning commissioning editors and publishers in the manner of making those physical objects, and not meaning any of the sales channels or the preexisting ways of producing cultural focus. This is really clear to me as someone who writes and publishes both on a weblog and books. There are certain channels of conversation in this society that you can only get into if you have written a book. Terry Gross has never met anyone in her life who has not JUST published a book. Right?

The way our culture works, depending on what field you’re operating in, certain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) generate more cultural focus than others. Shirky gives an example from painting: “Anyone can be a painter, but the question is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ People are always looking for these high-cost signals from other people that this is worthwhile.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in comedy, it might be an hour-long album or TV special; I’m sure you can think of others in different media. It’s a high-cost object that broadcasts its significance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work.

But, this is important: it’s even more fine-grained than that. It’s not like you can just say, “in writing, books are the most important things.” It depends on what genre of writing you’re in. If you’re a medical or scientific researcher, for instance, you don’t have to publish a book to get cultural attention; an article, if it’s in a sufficiently prestigious journal, will do the trick. And the news stories won’t even start with your name, if they get around to it at all; instead, a voice on the radio will say, “according to a new study published in Nature, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania…” The authority accrues to the institution: the university, the journal, and ultimately Science itself.

The French historian/generally-revered-writer-of-theory Michel Foucault used this difference to come up with an idea: In different cultures, different kinds of writers are accorded a different status that depends on how much authority accrues to their writing. In the ancient world, for instance, stories/fables used to circulate without much, if any, attribution of authorship; medical texts, on the other hand, needed an auctoritas like Galen or Avicenna to back them up. It didn’t make any sense to talk about “authorship” as if that term had a universal, timeless meaning. Not every writer was an author, not every writing an act of authorship. (Foucault uses a thought-experiment about Nietzsche scribbling aphorisms on one side of a sheet of paper, a laundry or shopping list on the other.) 

At the same time, you can’t just ignore authorship. Even if it’s contingent, made-up, it’s still a real thing. It’s built on social conventions and serves a social function. There are rules. Depending on context, it can be construed broadly or narrowly. And it can change — and these changes can reveal things that might otherwise be hidden. For instance, from the early days of print until the 20th century, publishers in England shared some of the author-function of a book because they could be punished for what it said. At some point in the 20th century, audiences became much more interested in who the director of a film was. (In some cases, the star or producer or studio, maybe even the screenwriter still share some of that author-function.) And these social ripples — who made it, who foots the bill, who’s an authority, who gets punished? — those are all profound ways of producing “cultural focus.” 

Foucault focused on authorship — the subjective side of that cultural focus — because he was super-focused on things like authority and punishment. But it’s clear that there’s an objective side of this story, too, the story of the work — and that the two trajectories, work and author, work together. You become an “author” and get to be interviewed by Terry Gross because you’ve written a book. And you get to write a book (and have someone with a suitable amount of authority publish it) because you accrue a certain amount and kind of demonstrable authority and skill (in a genre where writing a book is the appropriate kind of work). 

It’s no surprise, then, that the Big Digital Shake-Up in the way cultural objects are produced, consumed, sold, disseminated, re-disseminated, etc. is shifting our concepts of both authorship and the work in many genres and media. What are the new significant objects in the fields that interest you? Pomplamoose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and community created by it; and Andrew Sullivan somehow manages to be the “author” of both the book The Conservative Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when someone else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get people on blogs talking about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and interviews about it, so there’s something besides the Amazon page to link to. 

Maybe being the author of a blog is a new version of being an author of a book. I started (although I’m not the only author of) Bookfuturism because I started stringing together a bunch of work that seemed to be about the future of reading; through that, my writing here, and some of the things I wrote elsewhere, I became a kind of authority on the subject (only on the internet, but still, I like who links to me); and maybe I’ll write a book, or maybe I’ll start a blog with a different title when it’s time to write about something else. I don’t know.

It’s all being reconfigured, as we’re changing our assumptions about what and who we pay attention to.

Chimerical post-script: Not completely sure where it fits in, but I think it does: Robin and José Afonso Furtado pointed me to this post by Mike Shatzkin about the future of bookselling, arguing (I’m paraphrasing) that with online retailers like Amazon obliterating physical bookstores, we need a new kind of intermediary that helps curate and consolidate books for the consumer, “powered” by Amazon. It’s not far off from Robin’s old post about a “Starbucks API.” See? Even your coffee has an author-function.

Anyways, new authors, new publishers, new media, new works, new devices, new stores, new curators, new audiences — everything with a scrap of auctoritas is up for grabs.

 

The trouble with digital culture

One of the problems with studying any medium is that it’s too easy to mistake the part for the whole. Literature professors can confidently chart the development of the novel over centuries by referencing only a tiny well-regarded sliver of all novels published, some immensely popular and others forgotten. When you turn to the broader field of print culture, books themselves jostle against newspapers, advertisements, letters and memos, government and business forms, postcards, sheet music, reproduced images, money, business cards and nameplates, and thousands of other forms that have little if anything to do with the codex book. We tend towards influential, fractional exemplars, partly out of necessity (raised to the level of institutions) and partly out of habit (raised to the level of traditions). But trouble inevitably arises when we forget that the underexamined whole exists, or pretend that it doesn’t matter. It always does. If nothing else, the parts that we cut out for special scrutiny draw their significance in no small part by how they relate to the other, subterranean possibilities.

The culture of digital technology, like that of print, is impressively broad, thoroughly differentiated, and ubiquitously integrated into most of our working and non-working lives. This makes it difficult for media scholars and historians to study, just as it makes it difficult (but inevitable) for scholars to recognize how this technology has changed, is changing, and should continue to change the academy. Self-professed digital humanists — and I consider myself one — generally look at digital culture, then identify themselves and model their practices on only a sliver of the whole.

Digital culture far exceeds the world wide web, social networks, e-books, image archives, games, e-mail, and programming codes. It exceeds anything we see on our laptops, phones, or television screens. It even exceeds the programmers, hackers, pirates, clerics, artists, electricians, and engineers who put that code into practice, and the protocols, consoles, and infrastructure that govern and enable their use.

This is important, because digital humanists’ efforts to “hack the academy” most often turn out NOT to be about replacing an established analog set of practices and institutions with new digital tools and ideas. Instead, it’s a battle within digital culture itself: the self-styled “punk” culture of hackers, pirates, coders, and bloggers against the office suite, the management database, the IT purchaser. Twitter vs. Raisers’ Edge. These are also reductions, but potentially instructive ones.

For my own part, I tend to see digital humanism less as a matter of individual or group identity, or the application of digital tools to materials and scholarship in the humanities, but instead as something that is happening, continuing to emerge, develop, and differentiate itself, both inside and outside of the academy, as part of the spread of information and the continual redefinition of our assumptions about how we encounter media, technological, and other objects in the world. In this, every aspect of digital technology, whether old or new, establishment or counter-establishment, plays a part.

I’m writing this as part of the Center for History and New Media’s “Hacking the Academy” project, filed under the hashtag #criticism. Check out the other submissions here.

 
« Older Entries