Technology, Feelings and American History

Last week, in Slate Magazine, Vaughn Bell wrote an article titled “Don't Touch That Dial!” Vaughn reminds his readers that anxieties about the effects of emerging technology on cognition are not particular to our own age. Indeed, we’ve been worrying about how new communication technologies affect thinking for a very long time. Even Plato worried about how writing was bad for thinking in the Phaedrus. I cover similar ground in the below post. But my post is at once narrower and broader than Vaughn’s. It’s narrower in that I focus on just a few forms of communication in American history. It’s broader in that I’m grappling not only with feelings of anxiety but other feelings as well. As the humanities strive to find their place in the 21st century academics need to invest time understanding how the fit between our feelings and our technologies have evolved through time. For historians of the emotions this is fertile disciplinary ground!

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"We realized a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important as what you make....." -- BMW Television Advertisement


In reading the past through the concerns of the present, I’m guilty of presentisim, which among historians, at least, is a taboo. Still, even if committing this methodological sin can skew an understanding of the past, it can lend insight into the present. I was especially struck by this after reading David Henkin’s The Postal Age; the Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Henkin argues that the rise of the postal service allowed feelings of intimacy to be shared across greater distances than they had been prior to the the democratization of letter-writing. While a postal network was already in place by the Jacksonian period, it was primarily used as a means for distributing newspapers; personal correspondence was a secondary concern, and the cost of sending a letter was too high for the service to be used widely for this latter purpose. When rates dropped precipitously in the 1840s the exchange of letters rose dramatically, and in the wake of this, American’s in disparate places began to feel interconnected as never before. Henkin’s text is littered with personal accounts that document this feeling. For example, William Ellery Chaning observed that the postal office

“binds the whole country in a chain of sympathies….It perpetuates friendships between those who are never to meet again…..It binds the family in the new settlement and the half-cleared forest to the cultivated spot from which it emigrated.” Pages 50-51

Do Channing’s comments seem familiar? Today we have similar accounts of how Facebook and Twitter are expanding (or at least reworking) intimacy. For example, in the New York Times article “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” Clive Thompson claims that these new media are expanding so-called “ambient awareness;” the feeling of being near someone through the stream of Facebook posts and tweets found online.

Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too… Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes..Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. “It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.”

It’s not hard to come across other articles like Thompson’s. There are plenty of articles that document how new personal communication technologies are shaping feelings and how feelings, in turn, are reshaping these technologies. But Henkin’s history reminds that this reshaping has been going on for a long time. And wrapped up with this history is a complimentary concern about the proper etiquette and protocols to use when communicating through mediated means.

Since the advent of email, texting and twitter we’ve confronted all sorts of authoring challenges that resonate with longstanding epistolary challenges one finds earlier in letter and postcard writing: Should I begin my email with “Hi David,” “David,” or “Dear David?” How crafted and refined do my emails, texts, and tweets need to be? Since these technologies truncate my prose, should I be forgiven if I don’t craft my language as much as I might have in another medium? And just this month, with the advent of Buzz, people are lobbying Google to refine it so as to more closely mimic boundaries that we’ve established between our public and more private selves.

There is no question that we traffic in these questions today. But what is equally, if not more remarkable is that we confronted similar questions a hundred and fifty years ago. For example, Henkin narrates how Americans were not initially in the habit of checking for mail daily. In fact, days or weeks might pass between when a letter arrived at a post office and when it might be picked up by an addressee. As personal correspondence grew in popularity, and as correspondents began to expect quicker delivery and turnaround, the imperative to visit the mailbox or the postoffice more often also became more pressing.

This gradual immersion in a network comes as little surprise to those of us who’ve become more and more absorbed (or at least distracted) by growing streams of email, texts and tweets. But what is equally notable is that our own contemporary worries about how tweets and texts were corrupting writing are in some ways anticipated by the introduction of the postcard:

There was from the start something elegant, not to mention convenient, about cards that bore their own one-cent postage….since postcards supplied a built-in excuse for being brief, they further lowered the threshold for mail exchange (the postcard, as one recent celebrant puts it, “justifies, from the outside, by means of the borders, the indigence of the discourse”). Before 1845 a correspondent assumed a heavy burden in deciding to send a letter. Over the next few decades that burden had lightened, but the cultural construction of the personal letter as a gesture of intimate connection tended to maintain some of the earlier pressures…..if the postcard further democratized the exchange of interpersonal greetings, it fit uneasily into familiar constructions of epistolary intimacy. By emptying the personal letter of its enclosures, the tendency of the postcard was toward the reduction of correspondence to formal gestures. More obviously, postcards exposed themselves to public view….Page 174

Today we fret about whether digital technologies are deepening or shallowing out our relationships with others. But our worries are not completely new ones; they were anticipated by 19th century Americans witnessing the rise of the postal service. Although it’s not a new complaint much of the present discourse about information technology (and especially information technology within the university) suffers from historical amnesia; we often don’t go further back than twenty years in attempting to trace the ever evolving fit between our feelings, our technologies and our protocols or etiquettes. But as Henkin reminds us the connection between our technological present and our technological past is very much continuous:

Despite all the changes that separate us from the postal culture of the mid-nineteenth century, our pervasive expectations of complete contact, of boundless accessibility, actually link us back the cultural moment when ordinary American’s first experienced the mail in similar terms. The world we now inhabit belongs to the extended history of that moment. Page 175

It is perhaps too much to hope for, but as we fashion technology strategies for our university’s future let’s remember that our struggles to find a felicitous fit between our feelings and our technology precede the advent of the digital age.

The Mission Behind the Margin

In a recent post on the Educause Openess Discussion List Brad Wheeler counseled that while open-source may indeed be a social movement, the current cohort of adopters are likely to be alienated if it's referred to as such:

I believe arguments for the efficacy of open approaches to aid in research and education are best made in the language of economics, utility, goals, etc. There is no doubt that those who labor to make open projects and services are part of the Innovators/Early Adopters work as a movement. Yet, across the chasm, the language of ‘movements’ and ‘causes’ that may motivate some Innovators/Early Adopters may actually undermine interest by those who seek solutions for the same problems but listen for arguments of economics and outcome. They are sometimes quite turned off as they do not wish to join a movement or be dependent in the long-term on one. [To see this quote in context visit the Educause ListServ archives at: http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind1002&L=OPENNESS&T=0&F=&S=&P=2999 ]

Pragmatically speaking I'm convinced by this. I make the strongest appeals to campus constituencies when I draw attention to the features in an open-source product, when I suggest that it will mitigate vendor-lockin, that we won't be forced to upgrade (or retire) a system because of a merger or acquisition, and that supporting open source helps to combat the monopolization of the LMS marketplace. I’m less sure of my appeal when I bring up references to Richard Stallman’s free software movement or the Edupunks movement.

It is hard to deny the traction of Wheeler’s argument; a lot of CIOs (or at least the CIO conversations I witness on the Educause Listserv) are distinctly uninterested in questions about open-source as a movement or whether the ideologies of these movements are more or less in alignment with university missions. Instead, most CIOs weigh the benefits of open source by reference to more pragmatic criteria. The mindset was captured years ago in a Chronicle article titled “Open Source is the Answer Now What is the Question?” by University of Chicago’s CIO Gregory Jackson. In it Jackson inveighs against so called religious thinking and proposes that we analyze open source through a calculus of costs and benefits:

the meanings of open source are diverse. Not surprisingly, so are the arguments in favor of it. Some of them seem almost religious: for example, that software should be free, meaning that software is merely the representation of ideas and methods, and that ideas and methods should never be commercial property. Other arguments maintain that certain software companies are evil, and that to support open source is to combat evil…Open source can be the right answer when colleges and universities base their decisions on careful, complete analysis of relative costs and benefits, avoid unnecessary heterogeneity, specify integration requirements carefully, and avoid "religious" arguments…..My advice is simple: Treat open source like any other procurement possibility, paying careful attention to the functions it is to serve, how it needs to be integrated with other programs, and its costs. Avoid simplistic notions of good and evil. http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Source-Is-the-Answer-Now/2139/

Since Jackson’s and Wheeler’s views are representative of those of many other CIOs, we need to attend to these points of view as we’re performing open-source advocacy.

Still, even if these are good pragmatic strategies, choices between open-source solutions and proprietary solutions should be informed by understanding the larger social movements that support and lend significance to free software and free culture. And part of understanding these movements depends on articulating the values, ideologies and belief systems that give impetus to these initiatives.

While one might wish to avoid “simplistic notions of good and evil,” it’s hardly the case that there aren’t important value questions to consider when universities need to choose between open and closed partnerships. Nor should universities avoid using the language of ethics or values to understand what open source is. Indeed, value questions are the soul of the university. Without frank talk about ethics and missions and values we’d be failing to carry forth one of the most important ways that universities have made sense of the world.

The Alexandria Complex

At the American Historical Association meetings which I'm currently attending I dropped in on a panel discussing whether Google is good for history. Participants at the session identified many problems which Google has yet to redress adequately: the fact that Google’s landing pages don’t disabuse users of what one panelist called “the Alexandria complex” (the hubris to believe that all of the world’s knowledge might be contained in one place), that Google doesn’t clearly identify the limitations and biases that are inherent in online search, and that absent these warnings, Google may breed a level of epistemological trust in users that erodes the healthy skepticism upon which good scholarship depends. By and large I think Brandon Bader, the Googe rep, handled these criticisms gracefully especially in his willingness to acknowledge that he was a little “embarrassed” by the current interface in Google Books. Google might not be as transparent as librarians and academics would like it to be but it’s still playing an important role in democratizing access to knowledge. And while a Google search refracts and bends this knowledge, when used as a complement to other research techniques it’s good for history.

Still Not Dead

The most recent Sakai Executive Brief is out, this time highlighting the formation of a Sakai Product Council chaired by Clay Fenlason, a longstanding contributor to Sakai and perhaps it’s most erudite spokesman. True to form, Clay gave a very engaging keynote at last September’s Australian Sakai Conference which closely follows his article titled "Back to basics: the web, academic values, and Sakai" article. It's opening lines are:

“One could be forgiven for confusing virtual learning environment
(VLE) debates with those of theology….a growing number of voices has
taken up a Nietzschean cry, declaring the VLE dead. What now? What
will take its place, and on what grounds? …..Technologists who labour
in this area are in a period of soul-searching. The forms of VLE we've
known, however useful they have been, now plainly represent an
intermediate stage that will soon be superseded. The world has moved
on, and the form of the VLE must shift with it. Call this shift a
"death" if you like, but we're still left with the business of working
out its consequences.”

Clay is politic in not taking explicit sides in the Not Dead Yet versus the Social Media is Killing the LMS Star debate. But is it hubris to even tacitly suggest that the VLE is dead and that Sakai is poised to move beyond it?

On the one hand, it’s definitely not true. Sakai has many things to be proud of, not least of which is its efforts to re-imagine how the VLE as a CLE can better service the mission(s) of the university. And more so than any other VLE initiative, Sakai is making great efforts to leverage the wisdom of crowds.

On the other hand, Sakai still is playing catch-up in the VLE marketplace. Our own campus pilot and those of campus instructors at other universities have confirmed that there’s still some clunkiness in using Sakai if one tries to use it as a VLE. If in Moodle one can lay out a course in much the same way as one constructs a syllabus, in Sakai this is a much more difficult
proposition. In Lisa Lane’s illuminating essay “Insidious pedagogy:
How course management systems impact teaching” she levels much the same critique against Blackboard:

"The construction of the course syllabus is a familiar beginning point
for most instructors, yet few CMSs consider this. It would be natural
and useful for novice instructors to see a blank schedule into which
they could create each week’s or unit’s activities, rather than a
selection of pre–set buttons or links. Most professors think in terms
of the semester, and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved
within the context of time, rather than space. Some think in terms of
topics they want to cover. Blackboard/WebCT’s default organization
accepts neither of these approaches in its initial interface. It
forces the instructor to think in terms of content types instead,
breaking the natural structure of the semester, or of a list of
topics. Again, we know that the setup can be customized with relative
ease, by going to the Control Panel and selecting Manage Course Menu,
then using Modify buttons. You could change all the course menu
buttons into “Week 1”, “Week 2”, or organize by topic instead of
content type. But few professors try that, or they assume that they
can’t do it. Blackboard can be highly intimidating to learn, and may
“seriously hinder” choices the faculty member makes while using the
tool [4]. Faculty are led by the interface of a CMS not only because
they do not immediately see an alternative, but because the familiar
signposts (the Syllabus button) imply a single way of completing the
task (upload a document). Only the Moodle system provides a default
setup that looks like a calendar-style syllabus...."

Having taught for multiple semesters over many years in all of these systems, I can say that many of the same challenges that Lane experiences with Blackboard can also be found in Sakai.

When the next major release of Sakai is ready for adoption the course-authoring deficits mentioned above should be resolved. And there are already plenty of positive reviews of Sakai. But the play on Nietzsche’s jeremiad does obscure a very painful deficit that exists between Sakai and the conventional art in the VLE. Until it’s bridged, my bet is that my own school will continue to regard these other VLEs as very much alive.

Angels and Demons

I don't know of anyone who predicted the recent Blackboard-Angel initiative to merge. But it shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us. Even after the WebCT/Blackboard merger and the Blackboard patent suits we've continued to see universities make LMS acquisition decisions using rubrics that give little weight to our shared interest in enlarging the intellectual commons, fostering innovation, and discouraging LMS monopoly. Blackboard's initiatives are of a piece with what in the The Wealth of Networks Benkler and others have called the second enclosure movement. It's tempting to demonize Blackboard. But to the extent we ignore the potential enclosure of the commons when making LMS decisions we become, in some ways, "BlAngel's" willing victims.

AcademiX 2009

Last week I attended Apple's Academix 2009 conference at the University of Utah. There were some interesting presentations including ones by Paul Hammond, Richard Miller, Adam Gazzaley and David Wiley. I review some of what they talked about in Apple’s AcademiX 2009--the Closing and Opening Of University Minds

Frankenstein Talk

The adjacent poster advertises a recent panel discussion where we talked about university I.T. through the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelley encourages us to revisit our faith in technology, science and progress. In the context of the university are the new technologies we are deploying on campus promoting the university's mission? What should we be doing to make sure this happens? How do we avoid becoming Victor Frankenstein? We have created all these wonderful inventions. But have these inventions become our master's?

LMS Futures at Weber State

Putting profit ahead of wonder; patents, university missions and LMS decision-making

In the article When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder” (New York Times September 7, 2008 ), Janet Rae-Dupree reports that in the wake of the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act (also known as the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act), universities have ramped up their tech-transfer offices and focused on patenting more of the intellectual knowledge that is produced through university research. According to the act,

“It is the policy and objective of the Congress to use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development” and “to promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations, including universities.”


While the act was meant “to infuse the American marketplace with the fruits of academic innovation,” critics claim that it has “distorted the fundamental mission of universities.” Instead of openly sharing their research and making their findings open to others who might want to expand on it, universities “increasingly keep new finding under wraps” through the pursuit of patents and patent litigation. From the perspective of critics, the patenting of scientific technique and technologies “puts it out of the reach” of other universities who might otherwise have been able to engage in further research (in the case of a scientific finding) or create further innovations that build on a former invention (in the case of a technological innovation).

While Rae-Dupree is suggesting that the missions of the university are being distorted by the university’s pursuit of patents it’s worth pointing out that this may not be the only initiative that is jeopardizing the university mission and the enlightenment ideal of expanding the public store of knowledge. If universities are truly interested in contributing to the marketplace of ideas, we may not only be interested in revisiting patent activities within the university (although a balanced revisit must also look more closely at the positive contributions our technology transfer offices are making), we may also be interested in making sure that universities collaborate and partner with organizations outside the university that are committed to the vision of expanding rather than contracting the intellectual commons.

For example, for many years, universities have been weighing the relative merits of different learning management systems ( the huge and often very expensive software systems that allow schools to teach classes online). But while universities choose these systems on the basis of a myriad of criteria, many don’t give weight to whether the LMS is eroding the same intellectual commons (and open sharing of scientific technique and technology) that the critics of the Bayh-Dole Act are trying to preserve. In order to promote better LMS decision-making we should make this consideration more apparent. On the one hand, open source LMS solutions like Moodle and Sakai are very much intent on preserving this commons and it’s written into the licensing of the software. On the other hand, LMS companies like Blackboard are engaging in patent suits which are perceived by many in higher education to jeopardize open and collaborative technology sharing among universities.

Of course, whether or not an LMS organization is helping to expand or contract the intellectual commons can’t be the most important criteria guiding what LMS organization a university chooses to partner with. The more fundamental
concerns driving LMS choices need to be driven by the capacity of the technology to deliver quality instruction online. But that doesn’t mean that these issues can completely eclipse the question of the intellectual commons. Good LMS decision-making depends on weighing and considering the fundamental missions of the university including it’s abiding commitment to sharing and disseminating research findings and technological innovations. If particular LMS choices erode this commitment while other ones forward it, these considerations should be factored into university strategic planning in the same way that Rae-Dupree says that critics are reconsidering the way that universities should pursue the intents underlying the Bayh-Dole act.

Frankenstein In The University

My essay Frankenstein in the University was just published in Campus Technology. I'm also making available an unabridged version which explains at greater length why narratives of technological determinism often mask the larger social and commercial forces that drive IT change in the university. In the essay I use the literature of technological determinism as a device for thinking about the amount of influence that IT plays in determining university affairs. But much more could be said on the subject. For example, in the recently published Toolbox or Trap? Course Management Systems and Pedagogy Lisa Lane explores at greater length the way our CMSs constrict our pedagogical practices. And in a much older article titled "Aligning IT Strategy to Open Source, Partnering, and Web Services" Brad Wheeler grapples with open source options that may help universities to better control their IT destiny. For a quick introduction to the subject of technological determinism from the standpoint of political theory see Langdon Winner's piece Do Artifacts Have Politics?. For a topical article surveying technological determinism from the standpoint of a professional historian see Jill Lapore's recent piece in The New Yorker titled Our Own Devices; Does Technology Drive History?.