The New Globalist Is Homesick

My better half had an op ed piece in the New York Times today titled The New Globalist Is Homesick.  I'm very happy for her!  (And doubly so since there's a technology theme in the article).  Here's an excerpt:

Technology...seduces us into thinking that migration is painless. Ads from Skype suggest that “free video calling makes it easy to be together, even when you’re not.” The comforting illusion of connection offered by technology makes moving seem less consequential, since one is always just a mouse click or a phone call away.

If they could truly vanquish homesickness and make us citizens of the world, Skype, Facebook, cellphones and e-mail would have cured a pain that has been around since “The Odyssey.”

....The immediacy that phone calls and the Internet provide means that those away from home can know exactly what they are missing and when it is happening. They give the illusion that one can be in two places at once but also highlight the impossibility of that proposition.

Codifying the Humanities, Humanizing Code

In a recent post titled Don't Circle The Wagons Bethanie Nowviskie observes that while the humanities tend to have a more theoretical orientation, coders tend to engage in a lot more praxis.  While one could nitpick Nowviskie about how much this observation really accords with reality (coders can spend a good deal of time honing tools before actually using them to produce anything useful) it does point to a semantic issue that lies at the core of the Digital Humanities.  DH, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick has defined it, uses digital tools for humanities work but at the same time uses the frameworks of the humanities to make sense of digital technologies.  Louis Menand, in The MarketPlace of Ideas speaks of this duality too.  Although in his view it's not particular to the humanities but is instead a tension that exists more generally in universities that promote the liberal arts and more utilitarian disciplines:

Liberal education is enormously useful in its anti-utilitarianism. Almost any liberal arts field can be made non-liberal by turning it in the direction of some practical skill with which it is already associated. English departments can become writing programs, even publishing programs; pure mathematics can become applied mathematics, even engineering; sociology shades into social work; biology shades into medicine; political science and social theory lead to law and political administration; and so on. But conversely, and more importantly, any practical field can be made liberal simply by teaching it historically or theoretically. Many economics departments refuse to offer courses in accounting, despite student demand for them. It is felt that accounting is not a liberal art. Maybe not, but one must always remember the immortal dictum: Garbage is garbage, but the historyof garbage is scholarship. Accounting is a trade, but the history of accounting is a subject of disinterested inquiry—a liberal art. And the accountant who knows something about the history of accounting will be a better accountant. That knowledge pays off in the marketplace. Similarly, future lawyers benefit from learning about the philosophical aspects of the law, just as literature majors learn more about poetry by writing poems.

In embracing the university as a place that produces but also interprets, maybe one thing we need to do, as Digital Humanists take up the call to learn how to code, is to learn it in a way that embraces the dualities that Fitzpatrick and Menand describe.   Of course one can't learn to code simply through studying it's history.  But maybe,  when we teach and learn code we should spend more time dwelling on its origins.  As I begin to think how I'm going to teach an introductory course on Web programming next fall I wonder if there's room for the following video by Chuck Severance on the history and origins of Javascript:

My hope is that there's at least a little bit of room for history in these courses. If there is, we'll be in a better place to bring interpretive approaches to bear on technical subjects while also bringing technical know-how to more interpretive disciplines.

KCPW Radio Interview

Susan Matt (my spouse) and I were interviewed on KCPW today about our course "Are Machines Making Us Stupid?" Here is a link to the podcast on the KCPW site or listen to it here as well:

Segment 2: Living the Tech Life

Today’s conventional wisdom may be that a well-rounded life must include Facebook, iPhones and constant connectivity. But does technology and omnipresent media really enrich our relationships, boost our moods and enhance our intellectual capacity? Professors Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez join us to explore the question: Are machines making us stupid?

Guests:
Dr. Susan Matt, Professor and Chair of the History Department, Weber State University
Dr. Luke Fernandez, Manager of Program and Technology Development, Weber State University

William Powers and The Technological Humanities

Last week William Powers visited Weber State University and spoke about his book Hamlet's Blackberry. Recent articles in The Atlantic and in the New Yorker have cast him as a bit of a grouch about technology. Such portraits don't do justice to his message. While Powers says it can be beneficial to disconnect (via Walden Zones or via Digital Sabbaths) he's also quite upbeat about the ways that technology has drawn us closer together. The point in taking an occasional recess from our technologies and from our social connections is that it can complement our more social selves. By moving between these different experiences we can lead richer and more meaningful lives than if we simply seek one of these experiences while excluding the other.

He also isn't trying to dictate to anyone. Each of us needs to find our own balance between inner directed activities and outer directed ones. The way to find that balance is to examine our personal patterns of technology adoption and to identify the combination that develops this equilibrium in our selves. Diversity is good. If you don’t feel that the “world is too much with us” William Powers (unlike William Wordsworth) isn’t going to hold it against you.

Of course, in defending Powers, I'm not also trying to say that everyone needs to like his book. In fact, a portion of the students in the course I'm co-teaching this semester ( titled "Are Machines Making You Stupid?" ) took issue with Powers' claims about digital maximalism. (See footnote below.) That's fine. The larger point is that Powers visit sparked interesting conversations in our local community that complement ones taking place regionally, nationally and globally. Below are two short viral videos whose popularity suggest how salient these issues are in the zeitgeist (Powers showed them during his talk):

I. Disconnect to Connect


II. Girl Fall Into Fountain (sorry this one I can't embed)

Finally, if these issues seem present globally it's also worth noting that they are present historically. As our class is discovering, anxieties about technology are not new. We've been wondering for centuries whether our inventions are making us smarter or dumber, shallower or deeper. But just because we've been worrying about these questions since the time of Socrates doesn't mean we can stop worrying about them now. In order to adopt technologies wisely each generation needs to think these questions through anew. That's the curse (and blessing) of the "technological humanities."



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Footnote:

For our first writing assignment we had students respond to the following question:

 In Hamlet's Blackberry, William Powers asserts that "we've effectively been living by a philosophy . . . that (1) connecting via screens is good, and (2) the more you connect, the better. I call it Digital Maximalism, because the goal is maximum screen time. Few of us have decided this is a wise approach to life, but let's face it, this is how we've been living."


For your first writing assignment, we would like you to respond to this assertion. Do you agree with Powers's claims here? If so, why? If not, why do you disagree? You might also consider the following questions: is it truly a philosophy (or is it something else)? Do we truly value maximum screen time? Is it truly how we've been living? 

 A significant portion of the class questioned whether digital maximalism was as pervasive as Powers claims. They did so by referring to examples in their own lives or their family's lives in which they had been able to spend time away from screens. They also were reticent to blame technology for any pathology or addiction that might emerge in the presence of technology. To do so, in their view, would constitute an abdication of personal responsibility.

While those criticisms are fine as far as they go, I hope, as the course progresses, to encourage them to dwell a little more on this issue. In my view, taking personal responsibility and finding blame in technology are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory positions. In fact, often times they complement each other. By uncovering ways in which technology encourages certain behaviours while discouraging others we're in a better position to make informed and responsible choices about how to use our tools.

Getting students to speak with nuance about the ways that we shape our tools, and in turn, how tools shape us is a perennial challenge in courses like this. Students tend to think about these things in binary categories: either we're completely free beings who must take complete responsibility for the way we use our tools or we are "tools of our tools" who therefore can't have any responsibilities. Few consider whether there may be a spectrum of states in between these poles.

Beyond the conundrum of technological determinism I also hope that we get to explore digital maximalism in terms of Neil Postman's third idea:

The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

If digital maximalism isn't the "idea" or "philosophy" that is embedded in recent digital developments what philosophy is it then?

Google's Doodles and the Waning of Serendipity

I just finished reading The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser, who is the current president of moveon.org.  In keeping with the interests of that organization, Pariser’s book is an attempt (at least tacitly) to expand the communitarian and civic capacities of the Web.  But he makes his way there by arguing that the Web is confining rather than expanding our cognitive horizons.  Instead of introducing us to a broader and more varied set of people, the Web is increasingly taking us to points of view that are congruent rather than divergent with our own.  With personalized search and personalized social networking, the 'net introduces us to places and people we already like and that we’re already interested in.  As searching and matching algorithms improve, we’re increasingly exposed to material that is already relevant to our lives.  This, of course, is good up to a point: we like relevance.  The downside is that we’re challenged less and less to consider or visit perspectives that differ from our own. 

These trends have been in the works for many years now – Cass Sunstein famously identified them as far back as 2002 in the book Republic.com.  But, as Pariser argues, what makes them more worrisome in 2012 is that they’ve become more insidious.  In the past we narrowed our horizons through conscious acts: we went to nytimes.com instead of foxnews.com (or vice versa) by choice and more or less deliberately.  But as the Web has become personalized, these choices are increasingly made for us behind the scenes in ways that we’re only vaguely aware of.  When I visit Amazon.com and shop for The Audacity of Hope, Amazon also suggests I buy Bill Clinton’s memoir, but not say, Bill O’Reilly’s Pinheads and Patriots.  And when I visit Facebook, my friends, more often than not, seem to share similar points of view.  Pariser doesn’t reference Marx, but the filter is the modern generator of false consciousness.  In the past we did our own Web filtering.  But now our filters are selected behind the scenes.  In the brave new world of the personalized Web our false consciousness is created for us.

In Pariser’s closing chapter, he offers up a number of things that individuals, corporations and governments can do to allay the more insidious effects of filtering.  He suggests that as individuals we occasionally erase our tracks so that sites have a more difficult time personalizing their content. (To paraphrase Pariser: “If we don’t erase our [Web] history we are condemned to repeat it").  For corporations, he suggests that their personalization algorithms be made more transparent and that a little serendipity be introduced into searches so we’re occasionally exposed to something beyond our current interests and desires.  And for governments he suggests a stronger role in overseeing and regulating personalization. 

There are problems with Pariser’s suggested solutions and Evgeny Morozov, in his own review of Pariser, brings a very important one to light.  In expanding our civic and communitarian and serendipitous encounters, it would be nice if Google occasionally popped up a link to “What is happening in Darfur?” when we type “Lady Gaga” into Google.  But who exactly is supposed to decide what these serendipitous experiences are to be?  We may want to allay some of the cognitive deficiencies that the current 'net breeds.  But the danger in doing so is that we replace one bias with another.  In looking a little further into this I visited the thousands of doodles (e.g. custom banners) that Google has generated in the past couple of years.  Not surprisingly I didn’t see much there that’s over-the-top civic or political.  But maybe that sin of omission is better than the alternative: I prefer “don't be evil” (their current motto) to “do good but risk partisanship and bias in the attempt.” 

Pariser may not provide convincing fixes, but his description of the problem makes the book a worthy read.  One would think that as the information stream accelerates we’d become increasingly subject to distractions and to new ways of seeing the world.  In fact, Clay Shirky touches on this point in “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure:” the filters which the mass media industry imposed on late 20^th century media consumers have been corroded by the advent of the Web.    But the trends that Shirky makes light of  may be reversing.  Our cognitive horizons may be contracting rather than expanding in the age of personalization.  And our attention blindness may be increasing rather than decreasing as the filter bubble grows.  In bringing those concerns to light, Pariser’s has done good work.  

The Two Cultures

This blog is sort of an informal companion to a colloquium we hold here at Weber which is also called "I.T. in the University."  Recently we had the privilege of reading Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains which was edited by Eric Swedin and David Ferro who are colleagues of mine here at Weber.  The below is a guest post by them.

Most students of the history of science and the history of technology will remember “the two cultures” from their education.  The phrase comes from the English molecular physicist and novelist C. P. Snow who described in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) that a gulf of understanding existed between scientists and literary intellectuals.  The people within these two cultures understood their own cultures, but scientists often did not appreciate the humanities, and humanities-oriented intellectuals did not understand science.  Snow advocated education to overcome the ignorance on both sides.

The two cultures is a living reality even today and that the divide still exists is obvious on many college campuses.  Professors tend to dialogue only with professors in closely related disciplines and students often find themselves drawn either to science, technology, and engineering, or to the arts and humanities.  They learn different languages and different values about what is important.  A good example is the arts and humanities student who dreads taking a science class because they just see mountains of memorization and a way of thinking that bewilders them.  They think of a math class as an act of cruelty.  Of course, a science or technology student who is sent off to take their general education class in literature looks at a pile of novels that they have to read for class as nothing less than torture.  They find the novels boring and the discussions to be vague and full of opinions unsupported by any sort of methodical thought.

This divide is most unfortunate and people on both sides need to make the effort to learn about information from the other side of the divide, even if is material that does not interest them.  The authors of this guest blog entry have straddled this divide through doctorates from the arts and humanities side of the divide and considerable experience in teaching both computer technology courses and history courses.  One of the areas that drew our interest was science fiction.  It is often thought that people on the science and technology side of the divide have no appreciation of literature, but that it not true.  They just have their own literature.

We will not go down the rabbit hole of defining exactly what science fiction is, because there is no common agreement on an exact definition.  Much of the best science fiction is based on an understanding of science and technology and readers who do not have that background come away frustrated and bewildered from reading science fiction.  They cannot fill in the blank spots to evoke a sense of wonder that is often found in science fiction.  An appreciation of science fiction can build bridges between the two cultures as one side learns to appreciate humanities beyond just science fiction and the other side learns enough about science and technology to appreciate science fiction as genuine literature.

As computer experts, one in a Computer Science program and the other in an Information Systems program, we often noticed how many people in our fields that we knew liked science fiction.  This was particularly true of the students and professors in our field who were the top performers.  We wondered if we could document a connection between computing and science fiction.  This led to some articles and then to a volume of interdisciplinary essays that we edited, Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains (McFarland, 2011).  We found strong linkages.

Science fiction has often provided terms, concepts, and a milieu of technological enthusiasm for pioneers in the computer field.  Science fiction also provided ways for computer innovators to talk about where they thought computers were going.  More research needs to be done on the linkages between science fiction and computers, a wonderful opportunity for different academic disciplines to talk to each other, and we hope our book helps that conversation along.  We also hope that our book will encourage academics, educators, and other people to think about how we can bridge the two divides in our intellectual culture.  We need academics and students who are grounded in science and technology to appreciate the contributions made by the arts and humanities, and for the reverse to be true.

"From Behind The Safety of the Internet's Vast Perspex Shield"

On the Music For Deck Chairs blog, the author (who wishes to remain anonymous) makes some interesting observations on the recent pepper spraying of UC Davis student demonstrators by a UC Davis police officer.  The subsequent footage of the chancellor making her way past a gauntlet of silent students is also very moving.  In spite of these images, Music For Deck Chairs cautions us not to be too judgmental "from behind the safety of the internet’s vast perspex shield" (I love that phrase).  For sure, none of us want to model our behavior after that of Officer Pike, but some of us in IT are also guilty at times of colluding with hierarchical thinking.  It's still unclear whether the UC Davis protests and the Occupy movement will have the impact that the Tea Party has.  But I don't want these things to go by completely unnoticed on this blog -- especially since there is still a tangential connection to IT and the university.  I've reposted my comment to Music For Deck Chairs below:

To segue from your last paragraph I’m reminded of David Noble who probably would have seen resonances between the actions of officer John Pike and initiatives of elearning administrators (I draw the connection only because your blog is dwelling on both). Here is what he says in Digital Diploma Mills:

“Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically. At the same time, the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible. The technology also allows for much more careful administrative monitoring of faculty availability, activities, and responsiveness.”

This isn’t to say that all forms of “collusion with hierarchical thinking” should be conflated. But as I think you are saying, we better check carefully to see whether our own houses aren’t made of glass before shaming other people too stridently.

I wonder too, whether that process of shaming will lead to positive social change or something else besides. Sometimes the shaming of egregious repression of social protest has resulted in positive social change ( for example, Bull Connor’s actions in Birmingham were ultimately a P.R. victory for the civil rights movement). But the irony of the UC Davis protests is that the students were there because they were objecting to a tuition hike. Those hikes, while due to many things, have at least a tenuous connection to the Berkeley protests of the late 60’s. Those earlier protests were stirring but they also alienated some Californians who weren’t interested in romanticizing the academy as a virtuous fifth estate. That alienation played a role in the election of Reagan and the defunding of California higher education. So yeah, we need to take inspiration from the Mario Savios of the world, and all those who are bold enough to choose the risks of civil disobedience over the cowardice of little-Eichmanns. But we need to do this in a way that keeps the university in the good graces of the taxpayer and the constituencies who are a little less strident in their condemnation of people whose jobs require the strict following of orders. What then is the best way forward?

Digital Humanities in the University

I've been regretting that my blog has such a pedestrian title, especially when I compare it to some of the other blogs I've been browsing like CogDogBlog or BavaTuesdays.  Unlike those mysterious titles, mine has little irony.  It doesn't prompt the reader to keep asking what it means.  And the phrase "I.T." can sound uninteresting.  The first vision that may come to mind is a bunch of mainframes and Cobol programmers wasting away in non-descript tan cubicles.  That stereotype, as it's witheringly pictured in the movie Office Space, or as I lived it while doing Y2K patching in the late 90s at Ashland Oil Company, is certainly a part of what I.T. is.  And I suspect those faculty I'm friends with who don't quite know what I do at work, think these images sum it up.

Fortunately, the culture of IT, in the university at least, isn't usually as corporate as that vision.  We have our share of practitioners who wear suits, and who wax excitedly about books like Who Moved My Cheese, or Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.  But the reality is that IT in the University is a lot more than all of that.

On this blog, for example, I've been trying to highlight the digital humanities which are very much a part of I.T. in the university.  A nice synopsis of what this IT initiative is can be found in a recent Chronicle article by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.  But the fast and short story is that the digital humanities are two things.  First, humanities scholars are increasingly using digital tools in their teaching and research.  Second, the frameworks and approaches that humanities scholars use offer incredibly insightful perspectives for making sense of what I.T. is, where it should go, and it's role in forwarding the missions of the university.

To forward those activities some universities have established digital humanities centers (a flagship one for example is George Mason's Center for History and New Media).  But even on campuses which don't have formal centers, it's easy to uncover how much they can serve (and be served) by university I.T.  I'll leave a comprehensive survey of these service roles for a later blog post.  But for now I want to list three digital humanities concerns that I came across last week while on my own campus.  They aren't necessarily the most powerful examples or most salient digital humanities initiatives on campus (I'm leaving out for example the whole range of activities that our media scholars do in English and Communications -- including but not limited to Michael Wutz's research on emerging 19th century media and Sheree Josephson's research on computer-human interaction).  But I draw attention to them simply to illustrate that digital humanities concerns are a pervasive and topical presence on campus even outside of the areas where one would ordinarily expect to find them.  (If you don't care about what's happening on my local campus you might skip the italicized stuff below):

1) On Tuesday I was working with some students who were about to read Henkin's fine history of the postal service in 19th century America.  To spark their curiosity I mentioned that many of the concerns that we have about emerging media now are echoed in 19th century Americans' reactions to changes in postal services.  For example, when the postcard first came out in the middle of the 19th century, Americans expressed worries not unlike those worries we now have about the abbreviated messaging that happens in texting and twittering.   We then dwelt on challenges of salutation (which were as much an issue in the postcard as they are in email), which in turn morphed into a discussion of the manner in which proliferating media are eroding traditional institutions of authority (the recent audience disturbance during Weber State's performance of Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example).  After class, a couple of students noted that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some classes on netiquette.  A digital humanities center could do this and more, Rather than merely teach polite practices for the online world, it could lead us to examine how issues of authority, familiarity, cordiality, and social relations more generally take on new forms in the digital age.

2) On Thursday I met with two Weber State professors who recently published an anthology titled Science Fiction and Computing.  (I hope to post a transcription of that conversation here in a few weeks).  Like many anthologies, it covers a lot of ground.  But one thread that was particularly noteworthy was the insight that science fiction plays an important role in helping readers to sort through the moral challenges that past and present technologies have (and are) presenting us with.  While science fiction is sometimes seen as a form of techno-porn or technophilia, it actually also plays an important role in developing and evolving our understanding of IT.  It goes without saying that this too is a topical example of the digital humanities at work within our university.

3)  My spouse, who recently published Homesickness: An American History,  spent five years doing archival research to determine that the once popular sentiment of homesickness has given way to nostalgia.  Instead of indulging homesickness, the modern American economy celebrates nostalgia.  While the book is painstakingly researched, she was surprised when a reader used modern data analytics to corroborate her empirical research.  Using Google's Ngram viewer of the American library, the reader determined that indeed the use of homesickness has declined while the use of nostalgia has increased:

Of course there's a lot more to my wife's argument than is conveyed by a simple graph.  Analytics in and of itself isn't going to generate (or displace) the meaning and significance that is uncovered through archival work.  But as a complement to traditional humanities scholarship, these digital techniques certainly have a lot to offer.

These three anecdotes are not necessarily the most obvious examples of the way I.T. and the humanities intersect in our university life.  But their topicality suggests how omnipresent the digital humanities are in university affairs.  We need digital humanities more now than ever to make humanities teaching and research stronger.  But in turn we also need the digital humanities to make sense of I.T. and it's growing presence in university life.  We may not all have the resources to found digital humanities centers.  But there is certainly an argument to be made for creating umbrella organizations  to host conversations that address the ongoing concerns that the humanities, I.T., and the larger university share.

Happy Halloween

I went to a Halloween costume party Saturday night.  The theme was "Come as your favorite religious figure."  Maybe we don't have enough diversity in our university community because (without any coordination) two of us showed up as Steve Jobs.

I'm on the left and my friend Dave is on the right.

Occupy Park City: Reflections on #opened11

It’s the day after the Open Education conference in Park City. What can I say in a brief blog post to mark that event?  I want to thank Brian Jacobs of Akademos for attending the conference and being one of its sponsors.  We met while suffering through the trials of studying political theory in grad school.  While neither of us has become a practicing political theorist, we’ve been disciplined (for better or for worse) by our common education.  Over the years I’ve attended a lot of open-oriented conferences and been exposed to a lot of insightful perspectives.  But while that diversity has been good it was gratifying to be there with someone who was familiar with the same disciplinary frameworks I use for making sense of what a social movement like open education is all about.

That isn’t to say that I’ve got it all figured out beyond noting that the open ed movement gathers together a set of people and beliefs and practices that belie easy generalization.  This was epitomized on Wednesday when  Jim Groome began his presentation by popping out of a tent he’d pitched on stage as a way of drawing connections between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the open education initiative.  Jim gave an inspiring account of his teaching which is bold and experimental and seems to engage his students and prompt them to develop new media literacy.  But however important that message was, it was overshadowed by the stylistic contrasts between himself and the other featured speaker who was Josh Jarrett, Deputy Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Where Jim presented in an untucked t-shirt, Josh showed up in a blazer.  Where Jim flashed slides of Wonder Woman, Josh spoke in sobering terms of budget challenges, demographic changes and educational completion rates.   When the presentations ended David Wiley, thanked both speakers and asked the audience to reflect on the contrasts and on how these different archetypes complement and (perhaps sometimes) antagonize one another.

A presenter immediately after those keynotes asked the audience who they most identified with, and the answers varied.  Some said Jim, some said Josh, and milquetoasts like me said both (even though I was wearing a blazer). All of this is to say that, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, open education isn’t a phenomenon that is simple to define, and is replete with marked contrasts.  Its constituents identify with the underprivileged but the conference was hosted in a rarified and expensive locale.   Its constituents are attracted to archetypes of rebellion but the movement’s locus is in one of the more conservative states in the union.  It challenges traditional ways of disciplining the faculties but is led in part by a resurging discipline of instructional design.  Its advocates celebrate openness and democratization and sharing and the disruption of traditional academic practices.  But they promote different degrees of openness, and democratization and disruption.   It’s been interesting to see how this coalition has come together and whether it stays together going forward.