Social Web Interview

Here's an interesting interview on the "Social Web," a new Google initiative.  Apropos of class discussion tonight.  

Premediating the Outcome of the Stimulus

In yesterday's New York Times, Frank Rich explained just how difficult it has been for Obama to effectively premediate the effects of the stimulus bill. Rich alludes to an "America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door."

Rich futher elaborates on the precarious position Obama is in: "If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked...But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of 'success' in Iraq proved a sham."

I find the questions being posed here quite interesting, and quite relevant to understanding the logic of premediation. On the one hand, how does one premediate potential disastrous consequences without creating a self-fufilling prophecy (a very real danger, it seems, especially when it comes to the economy)? On the other hand, how does one premediate a secure and stable future (think of Obama's future-oriented rhetoric, from "Yes we can" to the constant motif of "hope") without seeming naive and misguided when such realities fail to materialize? I'm curious to see how Obama walks this tightrope in the upcoming months.

The Evolution of Facebook's 25 Things

Here's an interesting article from Slate on the evolution of Facebook's "25 Things." The connection is made with infectious diseases, but one might also see it from a Luhmannian perspective as a system being destabilized and then self-stabilizing. Which is only to say that these two models are related.

2009 MLA

For anyone interested who may not have received notice of the MLA 2009 call: http://www.mla.org/pdf/cfp_spring09.pdf

In Concert with Luhmann

In Luhman's section on "Entertainment" he addresses something with which I both understand and agree. On page 56, he discusses the freshness of entertainment and how there is only a need to read something twice if one chooses to admire the writer's artistic ability or to study how a film was produced and directed. He argues that the excited and entertainment factor of a work is based on not knowing how to read or interpret it.

That is one of my personal struggles, especially in studying film. It seems a bit harder to take the full entertainment value out of a book or an article, but it is easy to take the 'ooomph' out of a film. This is a challenge I know I will face as I move onto the other side of the classroom table and it appears to be a pedagogical tightrope: how to have students/viewers gain the most from the film viewing experience without eradicating the entertainment factor. I like his challenge to Tieck as he counters with the notion that the evolution and resolution of tension affords the viewer/reader the opportunity to 'forget' and move on through the entertainment experience.

The Transhuman Contexts of Literacy Practices

One line of thought I am trying to follow relates Bruno LaTour's notion of nonhuman actors with literacy studies. How and to what extent does the nonhuman and the transhuman shape literacies? A recent article, "Limits of the Local," by Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton begins a conversation in this direction. However, I would argue that they miss a great opportunity to fold the insights offered by affect studies into their discussion of the transhuman. Below I briefly summarize Brandt and Clinton's argument. I am hoping to use this position as a spring board; perhaps future posts may emerge from this as observations of potential examples for a paper in this class.

Brandt and Clinton argue that the socio-cultural turn in literacy studies, which emerged as a critique of the determinisitic autonomous model of literacy, may have taken too far of a reactionary swing, for the situated approach to literacy studies "under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy," including the global dimensions of literacies. Consequently, Brandt and Clinton urge literacy scholars to more fully consider "the material dimensions of literacy" and to thus "theorize the transcontextualized and transcontexualizing potentials of literacy -- particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure" (377). Some of the limits to the current paradigm of literacy research include the "assume[d] separations between the local and the global, agency and social structure, and literacy and its technology" (338). But at the heart of their critique is the argument that literacy has "certain 'autonomous' aspects" (339), which we must rehabilitate, for Literacy is neither a deterministic force nor a creation of local agents," which is what the situated approach seems to presume. "Rather it [literacy] participates in social practices in the form of objects and technologies, whose meanings are not usually created nor exhausted by the locales in which they are taken up" (338).

• Literacy has certain autonomous aspects

• Literacy participates in social practices through nonhuman agents (objects and technologies)

• Nonhuman agents extend beyond the global

To rehabilitate the "autonomy" of affects literacy, Brandt and Clinton turn to LaTour's notion of nonhuman actors. The socio-cultural approach to literacy research, according to Brandt and Clinton's critique, has presented "overwhelming evidence that human agents, individually and collectively, mediate literacy practices whenever they take them up – imbuing them with local intentions, resisting their often hegemonic currents, recrafting them to fulfill needs at hand." However, and here is where LaTour helps to extend the dominant paradigm, "objects are doing the same or possibly other things. They also are active mediators – imbuing, resisting, recrafting" (346).

So Brandt and Clinton's argument is that "We need perspectives that show the various hybrids, alliances, and multiple agents and agencies that simultaneously occupy acts of reading and writing. Agency is indeed alive and well in reading and writing but it is not a solo performance" (347). What we need, then, is a new analytical framework. These new frameworks must operate on the principle that literacy is 'autonomous,' though not in a deterministic sense, but in that "it is a something in practice, not merely an accomplishment of practice" (348).

This is the heart of their argument: Literacy is not just an accomplishment of practice, but is a something in practice. Conceptualizing a thingness in literacies aids in the further theoretical work of explaining how literacy mediates experiences, identities, power, and so on. So, here are the new (and gently reused) analytical frames proposed by Brandt and Clinton:

• Literacy-in-action: this concept would replace the notion of 'literacy event' (developed by Heath) by not favoring human actors over nonhuman actors as the former construct urges us to do. Rather, literacy-in-action points to not only the role of human actors in mediating the world through literate practices, but the role played by nonhuman actors as well. For example, we might not only consider the roles played by humans in the negotiation of a bank loan, but how "the various forms, instruments, and machines in the setting" frame the social interaction and carry a certain "social load" (349).

• Sponsors of literacy: this term comes from Brandt's earlier work; it urges us to account for the "underwriters" of literacies by "recogniz[ing] the historical fact that access to literacy has always required assistance, permission, sanction, or coercion by more powerful others or, at least, contact with existing 'grooves' of communication" (349). This framework connects human and nonhuman agents by drawing attention to how powerful agents act through objects, like literacy materials in a given setting. Access to the literacy/Discourse is channeled or gets acted out through the mediating role played by these objects.

I am particularly drawn to the literacy-in-action framework. One way I have been thinking about this idea is the question (which seems kind of panopticon-ish): how does the generalized architecture as well as the various objects located in a typical classroom come to shape and reinforce certain literacy practices? A further question might be how does the organization of a setting premediate the literacy practices that structure a social interaction? By this, how are nonhuman actors situated in social spaces inorder to shape literacies or Discourses as they emerge or become actualized?

How do the nonhuman agents in these scenes shape our language practices in social interaction? What discourses do these nonhuman agents call for?

Following this line of thought will require some thought along the lines of media studies. That will have to wait for a future post.

TV Screens and Computer Screens: Because you won't turn them both off

I read an article in the NY Times that took up Alec Baldwin's commercial for hulu that aired during the Super Bowl. The article talks about how the balance between print and video (online and offline) advertising has finally tipped toward the digital. One thing I found interesting here, though, was that because Americans are not used to reading non-visual texts, reading a newspaper feels like a burden. So they don't. But the article missed a point that Baldwin makes at the end of this hulu ad: TV and the internet work synchronously in today's media environment to present to us whatever is produced by American media corporations. And we are not going to turn them both off, so win-win for capital interests. This points out, in a funny way, the continued relevance of Enzensberger's argument while challenging some of its claims. Although the internet has reversed the electronic circuitry of the television, we largely remain, I think, complicit participants in the application of digital media by large capital interests. The circuits have reversed, but have our socio-cultural practices changed in meaningful ways at sufficient magnitudes?

The Medium is the Massage

Here's a link to the audio version of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage--like the book itself, it's really quite an interesting experiment.

Thoughts on Media in Television

I have been thinking about some of the films and television programs that have played on technology/media, etc. and began to wonder where they fall within the concepts of premediation and remediation (if they even relate).

One of the newer, albeit now cancelled, shows in question is My Worst Enemy. Thankfully, it has been cancelled, but it had the potential to give someone mental whiplash. I believe episodes are available on the network website http://www.nbc.com/. Briefly, there is a man who is living two separate and distinct lives--one as an executive in a tech firm and the other as a deadly secret agent. His life and his best friend's life are separated from their alter egos by an elevator where one personality is activated and the other deactivated. In a room hidden behind the scenes somewhere, his life is being manipulated by higher agents who are flipping switches and changing destinies.

His life is exhibited on screens in this backoffice: bio profiles, video feeds, etc. The agents working on his life know exactly where he is supposed to be and what he is supposed to be doing at all times and this creates havoc when his personalities get crossed. The hook in this show is that the agent himself is unaware of his dual life until he starts to have 'technical issues'.

I am wondering if this show plays subtly on the concepts we have been discussing....

from McLuhan

from "The Medium is the Massage"; click image for larger version.

Ryerson Lecture

Here's a link to the lecture I gave Thursday at Ryerson University's Infoscape Lab.