The Lives of Others

One of the remarkable things about Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg's The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age is its willingness to tackle the "mythology of technology that its virtues, vitality, and values are 'free'" (5). In a time in which "institution" can seem a dirty word, they repeat the importance of "institutional support" several times and emphasize the fact that digital learning requires labor, capital, material resources, and organizational structures aimed at sustainability. Unlike manifestos that reject institutional frameworks, the authors remind readers that "our traditional institutions" in higher education are notable for their "endurance and stability." However, Davidson and Goldberg describes how the book also served as a novel "writing exercise" that challenged conventional academic publishing norms, like many of the projects at the Institute for the Future of the Book, because it was vetted through a process of online comments facilitated by the Commentpress digital toolset. I found myself very sympathetic to the mix of innovation and pragmatism that the pedagogical philosophy of this book represents.

Nonetheless, after a rapid and enthusiastic reading The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Age, I was left with two possible criticisms.

First, although this book claims that its "primary focus is higher education," it was remarkably light on specifics. Given the tendency of philanthropic institutions only to fund K-12 initiatives that focus on what I have described as the "exoticism of the young," I was looking forward to a monograph that addressed the culture of college campuses, where academic scholarship and new social computing practices have had a particularly contentious relationship. I will confess that some of this attention to the subject on my part is also self-interested. My new book project, Early Adopters: The Instructional Technology Movement and the Myth of the Digital Generation, focuses on the higher education scenarios that I began writing about in conjunction with a talk at Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, when I first wrote about how knowledge paradigms and information paradigms differ. Furthermore, I've promised to write about local experiments with "interdisciplinary pedagogy" in which Southern California as a site for "regional advantage, to use AnnaLee Saxenian's term, for the upcoming DAC conference. Unfortunately, their "Portfolio of Virtual Learning Institutions: Models, Experiments, and Examples to Learn and Build On" contained almost no examples of work done for college credit. The Gamelab Institute of Play, Quest to Learn, the New York City Museum School, and the School of the Future in Philadelphia.

Second, I found myself thinking about the "others" mentioned in a passage about the transformation of "modes of organization, structures of knowledge, and the relationships between and among groups of students, faculty, and others across campus or around the world" (14). I noticed that these "others" were largely constituted as off-campus others, who might be "strangers" who could "remain anonymous" (16) as they participate in life-long learning, contribute to wikis, serve as audiences for faculty blogs, and enter into symbiotic information-exchange relationships with those on campus remotely. Yet one of the challenges to digital learning in higher education is precisely the fact that these "others" are often not far away. They are librarians, instructional technology specialists, and other members of non-tenure-track academic underclasses, who contribute much to initiatives for digital learning but are further marginalized by existing reward systems. Among friends and colleagues in the region, this last group includes book authors, bloggers, and editors who have influenced my own work.

As Clark Kerr once said, the university really is a "multiversity." It's easy for bomb-throwing guest columnists like Mark C. Taylor to say that we should "End the University as We Know It" by terminating tenure and dissolving departments. What's harder to determine is how digital culture can make campuses both better environments for learning and more just workplaces for those who never received the privileges that Taylor wants to end.

Miscellaneously Yours

I met the Berkman Center's David Weinberger last month when I gave a talk there and was very grateful that he provided a lengthy live blogging post that translated the group's discussion into text, so that the lively exchanges about what constituted the public record in the age of experiments with e-government could be disseminated with more keywords and metadata than a simple videorecording alone would have provided. I tend to be leery of live blogging, for reasons that I explain here, but I know from experience that even blogging with a slight rigor mortis has been appreciated by workshops and conferences [1], [2], [3], [4].

That's why I was especially pleased to realize afterwards that he was the same David Weinberger whose book I had been carrying around before my trip to Boston, Everything is Miscellaneous, an extended meditation upon what he calls "the power of the new digital disorder" that cites Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, as well as theorists of the digital age such as Vannevar Bush and John Seely Brown.

Not that I'd necessarily agree with everything in the book. When Weinberger enthuses about tagging I remember hearing research from Hugh C. Davis on folksonomy in 2007, which showed that many Del.icio.us tags were actually not useful for categorization purposes by others, since only about 5% of tags were usefully descriptive. For example, he said 34% of them could be categorized as personal references (“toHugh,” “myBlog,” “toRead,” etc.), and many used the redundant “SaveThis.” Others used evaluative terms like “cool” and “kickass" that were interesting in aggregate but difficult to work with. Weinberger's examples, like "SF" and "London," often suggested a much more limited range of meaning. Of course, with enough people tagging digital files, that 5% could aggregate a large number of useful tags, and it could be argued that users will eventually be trained in good digital behavior over time, much as people had to learn to say "hello" when they first picked up the telephone in the analog age.

As someone who specializes in "scandal, disaster, miscommunication, and mistakes," I would have liked to have seen more analysis of cases in which digital disorder seems to be . . . well . . . disorderly. For example, on page 100, Weinberger mentions the Wikipedia article on "elephant" without discussing Stephen Colbert's famous prank with that page.

Given his work as a corporate consultant, I also felt possible conflicts of interest could come into play, since his analysis was sometimes remarkably uncritical about how privacy could be compromised by commercial data mining that exploits unwitting or unwilling user behavior with new search and cloud-computing technologies.

Finally, by asserting that "[w]hen our kids become teachers, they're not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades drawn" (144-145), Weinberger sounds inclined to accept the idea of a "digital generation" a little too uncritically without considering the issues raised by Siva Vaidhyanathan in "Generational Myth" or the research of Diane Harley that shows that younger scholars aren't necessarily innovators with instructional technology.

But this is a useful book that contains real epistemological and rhetorical insights. For example, Weinberger recognizes that a profile on a social network site actually constitutes "a complex social artifact that results from my goals, self-image, and anticipations of how other people will interpret my list" (155) and that "length is a symbol of importance" in the Britannica, while it is "a manifestation of interest and importance" in Wikipedia (208). His definitional work on "knowledge" and "understanding" is particularly good and shows off both his Ph.D. philosophical training and his pramatic experience as a bestselling author.

Dumbest and Dumber

The words "attention deficit disorder" or "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" or their equivalents do not appear in the index of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), yet it is clearly an attempt to label the young with a sweeping pathology of cognitive dysfunction, even though Virtualpolitik pal Siva Vaidhyanathan has contested the very idea that such generational stereotypes can ever apply at all.

The irony of the very negative appraisal of The Dumbest Generation that I am about to offer is that there are a number of arguments about media culture with which I have to agree heartily. Yes, 1) not everything is a "literacy," 2) philanthropic institutions shouldn't be so in love with the digital practices of the young, and 3) Henry Jenkins doesn't always acknowledge the tensions between consumerism and civic life when it comes to participatory online culture. And personally I tend to resist the control that television and other channels for consumerism and popular culture have over child-rearing and family life, as this video and its sequel shows.

But as this Newsweek review notes, Bauerlein's complaints about the ignorance of the young are hardly novel in the literary record. Defending established culture against the ignorance of youth is a rhetorical trope that goes back to antiquity. Furthermore, not to be picky, but for a book that complains about poor vocabulary skills among digital readers and writers, I couldn't help but notice that on page sixteen he seems to misuse the word "querulous" in place of what sounds like he intended to be a synonym for "inquisitive." (If Bauerlein wants to locate every malapropism in my book, I suppose that's fair retribution, but I don't claim to be such a staunch defender of rigorously correct prose.)

Besides, how can you hate people under thirty with this much dripping bile and still work as a competent and professional faculty member? How would it be possible to teach your classes with this much misanthropy aimed at people of your students' ages? With this much contempt taking place in inner monologues that are so well-rehearsed, how can you not communicate it to the student seeking help on the other side of your desk? Well, based on his ratemyprofessor standings, it looks like he's an easier instructor than I am, ironically. So much for defending high standards of achievement for students.

I'm not sure that colleagues who are librarians would necessarily want to follow Bauerlein's recommendations either, given the disdain he shows for providing popular services, such as DVD check-out and computer access in public and university libraries. He would almost certainly find the design of my local library, which incorporates a café, objectionable. And yet, when I'm enjoying a coffee and a breakfast burrito with the copy of Harper's that I've grabbed off the rack inside, I can't help but notice that everyone around me in the crowded courtyard of the library has an open book, and so I feel like a relative illiterate in comparison.

Toward the end of the book, Bauerlein makes an argument about culture wars that praises the public intellectual, and yet his anti-Internet rhetoric seems problematic given what Daniel Drezner has said about the importance of the blogging professor in his recent essay "Public Intellectual 2.0" and many of the current conversations going on about new publishing practices in the academy, including this one about Open Access in the Humanities that I'll be moderating. (Come see! These panels tend to be very lively discussions.)

In her work on the paradoxes of institutional initiatives, Deborah H. Holdstein has argued that too much public rhetoric about educational systems ricochets between lamentations and Cassandra cries of "crisis" and giddy declarations about the wonders of an institution's or program's unmitigated "excellence." This book clearly belongs in the "crisis" camp, and it merely mocks those in the "excellence" camp -- sometimes justifiably -- without considering how to negotiate any common ground. In contrast, for a book that acknowledges the social and pedagogical risks of digital culture along with its benefits, check out Networked Publics from MIT Press.

Granted, there is a growing fissure between the informal online practices of Internet cultures of information and the academic conventions governing print cultures of knowledge in universities. I've said it on many occasions (like here and here). But why be a prohibitionist and a puritan, eager to forbid people's everyday digital practices? Politics shows us that this kind of fundamentalism can succeed, but what is the cost to the free exchange of ideas? In his section on "culture warriors," he seems to grant the importance of dissensus in universities, but he himself seems unwilling to acknowledge counterarguments, even from empirical researchers who make well reasoned cases for adopting the kinds of inquiry-based or problem-based learning paradigms that Bauerlein lampoons.

In the Obama era, his complaints about the lack of youth interest in the political process also makes the book seem dated, and the possibility that this apathy might have more to do with the workings of the electoral college and hanging chads in the 2000 election than with the availability of the Internet is never seriously explored.

Sure, there are many ways that Facebook and MySpace spread the mindless banality of high school into the broader culture. Anyone who's gotten a friend request from a former school tormentor knows that the pointless popularity contests of adolescence can continue in such social network sites, even if the tables might seem turned in adulthood. Mimi Ito admits as much in the recent report completed for the MacArthur Foundation with the colloquial title Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Ito describes two kinds of youthful Internet users: 1) those who use social computing technologies to facilitate high school affinity practices such as gossip and status-checking and 2) those who seek out more advanced forms of expertise in specialized knowledge communities. Bauerlein totally dismisses the latter group in his attack on the former, but -- speaking as the parent of a teenager who has used the Internet to learn about film noir, contemporary French drama, traditional printmaking, and the ethnomusicology of the blues -- I don't think the existence of this demographic should be completely discounted without any critical reflection.

This "geeking out" is also very important in the essay (later a book) "Hackers and Painters" in which Paul Graham claims that the problem with high school is not the cultural power of the young but rather their impotence. Graham argues that without the apprenticeship systems of old teenagers are locked out of meaningful participation in adult culture, and those who try to earn membership among the grown-ups by showing off their intellectual gifts or trying to be productive individuals are tormented as nerds.

Bauerlein talks about how Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Walt Whitman were liberated by books, but strangely Bauerlein does not seem to realize that for some liberation from the cruelties of bias and the mental poverty of lowest-common-denominator culture came from access to the computer not to the printed page. Speaking autobiographically, this was true for those of us in middle school computer labs who were not conventionally attractive or graceful in face-to-face interactions or who struggled with poor handwriting and organization. When I read novels from the past about accomplished heroines with beautiful penmanship, dexterity with the needle, and competence at piano playing, I am often grateful that I live in the digital age where I am not an unmarriageable failure living as an outcast in penury.

Certainly danah boyd has written about the importance of the Internet for gay teenagers in the poisonously homophobic atmosphere of high school in which the ultra-masculine jock and the ultra-feminine homecoming queen and/or cheerleader rule as the royalty on campus. The possibility that the Internet could facilitate potentialities for genuine -- as opposed to fatuous -- "resistance identities" in Manuel Castells' terms to teen conformity and consumerism is never seriously entertained in Bauerlein's book.

Which brings me to the subtle heterosexism of Bauerlein's text that actually contains a line about how "father fights the traffic" while "mother must prepare dinner." In my household, I'm the one driving from UC Irvine to Santa Monica while my husband does wonders in the kitchen. Geez! How can someone assume this Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle still persists among a dual-income readership?

Finally, I have to say something about all the cheap shots that Bauerlein takes that are aimed at the brain-stultifying din of crappy pop music that no one is defending, and precisely the kind of music that teens are rejecting through Internet radio and other online alternatives to what he not very carefully considers to be the ubiquitous pap of "Tupac and Britney."

So I'd close my diatribe against Bauerlein by referring readers to this DJ Earworm mash-up of Billboard's top twenty-five chart-topping pop hits that was created first for a very non Ozzie and Harriet gay audience of San Francisco clubgoers to mark the end of 2008 with the dizzying spectacle of racial and sexual stereotypes, romantic melodrama, consumerism, instant gratification, and commodity fetishism emptied of its destructive social directives and turned into a clever musical soup that is danceable and evocative of guilty nostalgias and heterogeneous pleasures that Bauerlein would have us condemn.

The Postdemocracy Always Rings Twice

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of "postdemocracy" during the course of the Obama campaign, particularly after friends Ava Arndt and Julia Lupton wrote this essay about "forgetting representation" and embracing participation in many-t0-many practices of political life.

On this subject, Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society is an an ambitious collection of essays that attempts to come to terms with with what editors Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, and Geert Lovink call the "postdemocratic" political order that is being shaped by computer-mediated communication and distributed electronic networks. The collection shows how far thinking has come about e-government in the last decade beyond old HCI paradigms that only focus on usability or access, as the authors follow trends in generally non-governmental civil society organizations toward subsidiarity, multistakeholderism, the role of expertise, and reputation management created by the "hybridity, reflexivity, mobility, and performativity" of networked social units.

Unfortunately, sentences like the following one may need a bit of unpacking for readers outside of these debates: "Experiences of diasporas and of creolization come forward from the margins, highlighting less displacement and mixture than the centrality of reputation management as a vital component of network society's postdemocratic governmentality." In somewhat plainer English, the beginning of this sentence tells us that the authors are well aware of arguments in recent critical theory taking place in Europe and the postcolonial world that include Étienne Balibar's ideas about "fractal borders," Eduoard Glissant's critique of Négritude, and the rise in academia of "diaspora studies" and have chosen not to pursue themes of "displacement and mixture" that are popular in other schools of critical Internet studies and will instead consider the role of strategies of command and control. By using the distinctive term "network society," we know that these writers have read Manuel Castells (and probably Jan A.G.M. van Dijk before him). We also know that they are influenced by the later work of Michel Foucault, particularly his work on "governmentality."

The first essay by Noortje Marres in the collection examines the intellectual history around "issue networks" that are divorced from political parties or other formal structures of institutional politics and cites the work of Hugh Heclo who pointed out some disturbing aspects of this phenomenon back in the Carter administration. The next essay by Ned Rossiter is clearly one that I see in dialogue with my forthcoming Virtualpolitik book, which opens with a great allusion to the Communist Manifesto: "A specter is haunting this age of informationality -- the specter of state sovereignty." Rossiter goes on to talk about the "limits of liberal democracy" and question how well rational consensus models of politics from John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas really work in an era of multistakholderism by citing and then critiquing the work of Chantal Mouffe and then Wolfgang Kleinwächter. The next essay by Clay Shirky is probably the most accessible to nonspecialists, since it uses graphs to explain how "power laws" generate inequality in the supposedly nonhierarchical structures of the blogosphere. Written before the era of YouTube and the work being done in connection with the Video Vortex project, Drazen Pantic's "Anybody Can Be TV" looks at videoblogging as a possible challenge to network news.

Then, a number of provocative case studies from around the world follow. Lina Khatib writes very intelligently about one of the current areas of fear-mongering about the Internet, the use of the World Wide Web by groups of Islamic fundamentalist radicals. As someone actually able to read the language and study the relationships of hyperlinks, Khatib's thoughtful analysis of the rhetoric of these sites and how it relates to cultural conversations about globalization provides much needed scholarly perspective on this subject. (For those interested in further reading, this report from the International Crisis Group is also useful.) Merlyna Lim's essay about the Internet in Indonesia points out that electronic distributed networks have been useful both for toppling despotic governments and for promoting jihadist agendas that undermine liberal democracy. For a great overview about the role of mobile telephones in the politics of the developing world, Okoth Fred Mudhai's essay is also very interesting.

The final section of the book looks at international governing organizations for the Internet and debates about ICANN and the United Nation's World Summit on the Information Society. Articles by Hans Klein, John Palfrey, and Claudia Padovani and Lovink's interview with Milton Mueller close the book with an exploration of issues, conflicts, and rhetorics involved with transnational governing bodies.

Learning from Los Angeles

When Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas in the nineteen-seventies, they celebrated the vernacular architecture of America's Sin City in its "classic age" and also ushered in decades of postmodernism, pastiche, and the signifier writ large, so that corporate branding and eye-catching signage could rise in other urban landscapes.

For most of my adult life, I have lived in what is known as "the Greater Los Angeles area," but often I am not sure what I should be learning from my home city, which has been called "Fortress L.A." by Mike Davis and compared to a wild animal park, where one drives around with the windows rolled up, by Jane Jacobs. In recent years, there have been a number of high profile buildings erected in my native metropolis by world-class architects, who have included local son Frank Gehry, designer of the Disney Concert Hall, and Our Lady of the Angels cathedral architect José Rafael Moneo. Yet, speaking as a resident, I'm less interested in signature buildings created by auteurs and stars and more interested in how public space is imagined collectively through deliberative processes and -- as someone never hesitant to talk about failure and its rhetorics -- I think it is useful to admit that right now the downtown area is an instructive example of a city gone wrong.

Today I hosted Dutch media theorist and Web 2.0 critic Geert Lovink for the morning, and we visited local civic landmarks that included Clifton's Cafeteria, The Grand Central Market, The Bradbury Building, and The Los Angeles Central Library. As Lovink wryly observed, on our city's Broadway was a display of American socialism at its most gratuitous, since there were lots of examples of state-sponsored production taking place in the garment factories secreted in the office buildings overhead that were also advertised at street-level in the subsidized prices of goods being proffered in the often makeshift storefronts, which ranged from accordions to bootleg DVD recordings to ballet flats.

I'm fascinated with how city planners can't deal with the demise of the area's great movie palaces on Broadway, after patterns of media-consumption permanently changed in the period after the second World War. In any other city, these shuttered and under-utilized buildings would have been demolished and replaced with more viable enterprises, but Los Angeles holds the classic era of its dream factory in special regard. Unlike the historically significant Victorian gingerbread mansions of Bunker Hill, which were hauled off on trucks and deposited alongside the Pasadena Freeway as decrepit museum pieces, there are pressures for maintaining eternal "conservancy" that require that these dozen once grandiose movie palaces stay right where they are, in limbo and falling apart over time.

Since I've never known them during their heyday, I can accept that there aren't any big movie theaters downtown, but what was much more disturbing was the realization that there aren't any major bookstores either. This wasn't just true for the downtown area, which Lovink's hotel concierge reported as being essentially bookstore-free, but it has also become a reality for the rest of the city, where independent booksellers have closed down in record numbers in the past decade, during which time I have seen the demise of some of my favorites: Dutton's, Acres of Books, Midnight Special, Sisterhood Books, and La Cité des Livres. Luckily, New Mastodon Books, Hennessey + Ingalls, Amok Books, and the Technical Book Company still seem to be in business, but LA is a difficult hometown for a serious bibliophile.

One of the other depressing aspects of urban decay that was apparent was the impending demise of the famed murals on the now defunct Victor Clothing Company, which has now closed its doors after outfitting many generations of Latino and Latina customers (on credit) for weddings, quinceañeras, first holy communions, and other important celebrations in the lives of the city's working class Spanish-speakers.

After witnessing these symptoms, Lovink's verdict on Los Angeles seemed not to be as harsh as the one in Eric Kluitenberg's new Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, which Lovink gave me from his Institute of Network Cultures press. In characterizing the socio-political detachment of onetime LA resident Francis Fukuyama, Kluitenberg described the downtown of my city as "a condensation point of material inequalities, racial segregation, gang violence and drug-related dilapidation, all probably a consequence of generations of bad governance, or the very absence of it all together" (60).

Downtown may not be the kind of segregated, gang-infested territory that Kluitenberg depicts, largely because much of the worst dysfunction has relocated to residential commuter areas, but he is certainly right that the Community Redevelopment Agency is completely paralyzed with inaction as it weighs a myriad of more bad plans for privatization. Witness the following idiotic generalizations by one city planner quoted in The Washington Post:

"Angelenos are different than the rest of Americans," said Dan Rosenfeld, a partner at a downtown real estate development firm. "We are a collection of individuals, not a community." He noted that Los Angeles has some of the best private gardens in the United States but the worst parks, some of the most stunning private architecture but disappointing public buildings, the greatest private art collections but middling museums.

"L.A. is impossible to plan," Rosenfeld said. "Its civic character is a bundle of energy and not a place."

It was well worth staying up late to read the rest of Delusive Spaces, which included several compelling essays on media theory in an age of hardware and software in which "network standards, technical protocols, industrial agreements, the formal logic of computing machineries and the software platforms that run on them affect the production of new forms of cultural signification" (21). For example, "media archeology" has become an important mode of thinking for many critics, myself included, and Kluitenberg's essay on the subject brings together Michel Foucault, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Lacan. Unlike others in the United States, he doesn't entirely embrace Deleuze and Guattari, on the grounds that he wants to "keep some of the categories introduced above intact: the apparatus, the subject and a sense of history." (72). There are also political essays about technology, governance, and governmentality that would be of interest to American STS audiences, such as "The Post-Governmental Condition" and "Constructing the Digital Commons." In addition, Kluitenberg's essay "Media Without an Audience," which is also available online, makes a number of prescient claims about user-generated content and social media.

Getting Their Game On

Usually I don't review mainstream trade books, but Grand Theft Childhood by Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson of Harvard's Center for Mental Health and Media at the Massachusetts General Hospital merits some attention from academics as one of the few good books on the market about digital parenting that synthesizes actual research and presents it to the public in a responsible way. (In this area, I liked the recently published Parenting, Inc., which slams the consumerism of supposedly "good" media influences from the edutainment industry as well.)

Much of Kutner and Olson's book is devoted to the scientific method and explains the basic of academic research to nonspecialists: what defines statistically significant results, how is "validity" determined, how can causation and correlation be separated, etc. They also look at the possible effects of non-gamelike exposures to violence from authoritative cultural discourses, such as the evening news and even The Bible, with a detailed examination of one study by Brad Bushman that was published as the paper "When God sanctions killing; Effect of scriptural violence on aggression."

Of course, in addition to appreciating its references to and explication of actual experiments, I like the fact that the book seems to agree with several of my 10 Principles for the Digital Family and provides in depth explanations of many of the precepts that are dear to my heart: 1) Play with Your Child (chapter nine), 4) Be an Adbuster (chapter six), 5) Distrust Ratings (chapter seven), and 6) Raise the Issue of Inappropriate Behavior Appropriately (chapter five).

I appreciated that Kutner and Olson aren't merely apologists for the videogame industry either. In the past, I've argued that some of the arguments put forward about the educational value of videogames ironically use the same mimetic logic about how games inspire imitation that game enthusiasts reject when it comes to games and violence. Although Kutner and Olson seem to take Aristotle's side of the argument more often than Plato's when it comes to the old debate about the effects of media upon the young, by looking at catharsis as well as imitation, they make their argument even more nuanced by pointing out that different populations of young people respond differently to the characters and the stories with which they are presented.

In their chapters "Déjà Vu All Over Again, and Again" and "All Politics is Local," the authors also lambaste the misdirection of high-profile legislative hearings and the opportunism of politicians on both sides of the aisle when lawmakers ignore research and first amendment issues and uncritically join the chorus of anti-digital media rhetoric. Although they miss out on what I have called the "SonicJihad debacle," they get plenty of other embarrassing legislative moments in their pages. This kind of "government by acclamation" certainly deserves more critique in parenting research circles, since it doesn't teach the civic values about deliberation and participation that are really important to our kids.

(Thanks to Ian Bogost for suggesting the book.)

Computers for Smarties

Speaking of "books that make you dumb," I've recently looked at two books about digital rhetoric that make reference to the "For Dummies" trade paperbacks. One is literally a "For Dummies" book, Second Life for Dummies, written by Virtualpolitik pals Sarah Robbins and Mark Bell. Robbins is known for her work teaching communication skills in virtual worlds, and as a result the book has a strong rhetorical orientation with chapter titles like "Jumping into the Conversation: Express Yourself" and "Creating Your Second Life Persona." It also contains material about teaching and learning in Second Life, although they downplay their professional work as researchers in the text. I see Robbins and Bell on the conference circuit, and the last time we caught up on their globe-trotting promotional efforts, Bell was giving a presentation to the Kinsey Institute about sexual practices in SL. (He was debating how much to say about the experience of being cruised by a giant animated taco.) Robbins has been emphasizing the tricky boundary shifting that can challenge any pedagogy with a slogan from her talks, "Don't come to class naked."

Although it has been out since 2001, Laura Gurak's Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness also acknowledges the "For Dummies" genre. As Gurak writes, "Unlike many of the 'how-to' books and 'dummies' guides' on the market, this book is not a technical listing of what to do and not to do." Unfortunately, a lot of the book seems dated now, which I know is a hazard faced by any new media title. It's messages about gender, "techno-rage," and hoaxes could also be said to play into many of the implicit assumptions key to the current reactionary political mood that focuses on cybersafety rather than building public information infrastructures. There's also a kind of normative moralism that runs through the book, even though I've made arguments in favor of dissimulation, exhibitionism, and transgression in Internet environments. The issue really is "cyberliteracies" not "cyberliteracy," I would argue. Finally, even though Gurak is an expert on the clipper chip debate and the role of technical constraints in online communication, the book is relatively light on the forms of procedural rhetoric being written about right now by Ian Bogost and others.

Show Offs and Showdowns

Lovink's chapter on "Updating Tactical Media" in Zero Comments raises a number of interesting issues in thinking about balancing activism with engagement with policy-making and the role of the public intellectual assumed by many of my colleagues both inside and outside academia. Lovink quotes Paul Garrin's warning that "Tactical Media is not only something that Media Activists engage in. It's advertising, corporate psychological warfare of Perception Management."

As someone who well remembers Act Up, I'm not sure that Lovink is right to date the phenomenon to 1992, although his catalogue of "ways to connect, relay, disconnect -- and again reconnect -- a veritable stampede of pirate radio waves, video art, animations, hoaxes, wi-fi networks, music jam sessions, Xerox cultures, performances, grassroots robotics, cinema screenings, street graffitti, and (don't forget) computer code" accurately describes how tactical media attempt to engage public audiences by mixing branding with political subversion and high art with low. Despite the critique of blogging with which Lovink opens Zero Comments, he also argues that "blogs are an essential vehicle" for "sticky ideas."

One could argue that the recent public showdown between friends, colleagues, and fellow copyleft advocates Kembrew McLeod and Siva Vaidhyanathan over a robot-costume/Bill-Clinton-heckling incident also represented a kind of showdown between Tactical Media Activism and Critical Information Studies. There are certainly those who use tactical media who have a place in the academy and even members of The Yes Men are known to keep campus office hours and go to department meetings. But there is certainly tension between those who embrace the spirit of what Lovink calls "protestivals" and those who focus on public testimony wearing suits to try to convince policy makers by using formal channels for official political deliberation.

Finally, I tend to side with Lovink when he says that at least theory needs to be part of the globalization debate as well, but -- since I studied with Derrida and Lyotard in graduate school -- I may not seem like the most neutral party on that question to readers of this blog.

(Speaking of Tactical Media Activism, I will be giving a talk about hacktivism at this year's Popular Culture Association in San Francisco.)

Before and After

In the personal reportage in Zero Comments, Geert Lovink discusses the challenges to sustaining international collaborations that use digital media over time and the politics of project management in "Revisiting Sarai" and "ICT after Development." In the section on Sarai, Lovink discussed some of the challenges to the project in that English-centric "programs and keyboards" were often poorly suited to Hindi digital projects and yet the center's Hindi-language projects also wanted to maintain a spirit of international exchange and avoid the obsession with cultural purity associated with the Hindu nationalists. (See the work of Humanities Core Course colleague Vinayak Chaturvedi about the tropes and "politics of naming" of Hindutva for more on this subject.) I found the projects that had been done by the Sarai Cybermohalla as an interesting way to rethink the digital divide. He pointed out the importance of promulgating public writing practices through the centers' "streetlogs," which acknowledged the importance of "listening" as well as authorship in producing responsible social media, and he asked where there might be a "new media equivalent of revolutionary Third World educator Paolo Freire."

Having presented at an international conference devoted to crisis management technologies (at which -- sadly -- participants were confused about why humanists should be part of the conversation to talk about ideologies and cultural imaginaries that have real world consequences for victims), I was sorry not to have been present for the "Crisis Media" event described in the book.

Lovink also argued that Sarai projects that were intended to subvert the hegemony of Microsoft had to acknowledge that free software can't be isolated from "social reality." Unlike those associated with the One Laptop Per Child initiative, Lovink described the uncomfortable realities of how compromises had to be negotiated between stakeholders and how rifts even emerged between artists and hackers seemingly that had to be negotiated by the Indian project managers. He even printed the text of a controversial e-mail from a West German former resident in the project

The chapter on ICT and "The Incommunicado Agenda," Lovink looked much more specifically at OLPC and what he characterized as an agenda of promoting "(Western) subjectivity." However, sometimes Lovink sounded more like Manuel Castells than a digital artist in this chapter, when he grappled with the erosion of the traditional U.S. role of policy making and how large private corporations are filling the vacuum with proprietary technologies. At the same time he uses the fascinating account from the personal digital literacy narrative of African economist Sylvestre Ouédraogo to show "the failures of a technocratic approach that only focuses on access."

Although he criticizes "PowerPoint optimism" and encourages more discussion of the "Why did my project fail" question, Lovink gives considerable praise to the projects oriented around civil society initiatives (rather than less sustainable "grass roots" movements). Much of this chapter looks at Incommunicado and the hope that groups of such groups could successfully hold summits on information policy that take the needs of non-Western countries seriously by organizing the equivalent of a "Digital Bandung."

Unfortunately, books on digital media rapidly become dated. I don't know if today, Lovink would assert, as he does in Zero Comments, that NGOs are reluctant "to use blogs, wikis, and social networks," although he may still be rights that "there are no global NGOs like Greenpeace, Amnesty, or Oxfam that critically investigate the Internet and the new media/telecom sector" to provide an international equivalent of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

Time-Share Mondos

Near the center of Geert Lovink's Zero Comments, there is a chapter about Internet time called "Indifference of the Networked Presence," much of which deals with concepts about economies of attention and distraction familiar to readers of Richard Lanham and Peter Krapp respectively. Lovink points out how these fluctuations in attention and distraction also contribute to the abandonment of blogging by early-adopter figures like Joi Ito (and I would argue Krapp also).

In much of the chapter Lovink describes the common fugue experience of online time in which minutes, hours, and days disappear in time passed in front of the computer screen that is spent engaging with a range of texts and social actors. Rather than adopt a Puritan attitude about time wasted, Lovink compares this wandering through online environments to the figure of the flaneur familiar to readers of Lev Manovich and Ian Bogost, as well as to those more obviously of Walter Benjamin.

I thought that Lovink made a convincing case for the rise of "enhanced global time awareness" in the Internet age rather than the need for any one regime of standardized online time that would be enforced by a single regulatory structure. As someone who frequently collaborates with people in other continents, I try to be sensitive to the circadian rhythms of global others, even if I will admit to doing the math wrong at first when I scheduled James Kotecki to come to my class via teleconference.

Unfortunately, this form of temporal consideration often doesn't occur to conference organizers who make automated online submission cutoffs dependent on implicit assumptions about the time zone naturalized by possible participants. I'm grateful whenever I see a due date of "11:59 PM Apia Time" on a call for papers and know that I'm dealing with academics who understand that even deadlines can be relative for those in other time zones and that the best policy is one with the most generous interpretation.

Double Dutch

Geert Lovink weekend continues here on Virtualpolitik, as I respond to the book Zero Comments, the excellent critique of Web 2.0 that arrived in my holiday stocking. Having spent some time in the Netherlands recently, visiting with friends and going to a conference, the chapter on "Blogging and Building: the Netherlands after Digitization" was of much more interest to me than it might be to many other Americans, who think of little more than Xaviera Hollander and legalized marijuana when they think of the country. Part of my own blogging practice is situated in the Netherlands, since I write for Marc van Gurp's Osocio, which is based there and in fact began its Internet life as the Dutch-language Houtlust.

In this chapter he makes what might seem to be a tenuous connection between Dutch architecture and practices of urbanism and the distributed networks and social media platforms of the Internet. Furthermore, as Lovink writes, "I was more concerned with how architecture is networked and less how the network obtains architecture." He points out that for all the awards and international accolades that Dutch architecture has earned, "the Internet and mobile phones remain largely overlooked in the environmental planning debates."

Given Lev Manovich's argument about "transcoding" and the way that the 3D software program Maya, which I am currently learning, is increasingly likely to shape the dimensions of the urban landscape, it is interesting that Lovink asserts that "virtual architecture is all too often cast as nothing more than some inconsequential trick of the trade or marketing tool."

Lovink also quotes some remarkable passages from the writings of Jennifer W. Leung about architecture, which like Anna Munster's book on the subject, interrogate Cartesian ideas about space. Leung's arguments about modeling dynamic activities in urban spaces in order to run simulations rather than pitch static models to clients is an interesting argument for re-imaging software.

In this chapter Lovink also looks critically at the rise of user-generated architectural content by consumers who can now use software to design and remodel spaces with off-the-shelf architectural components. He rehearses some of the debates about "architecture without architects" that relate to "rise of the amateur" discussions going on in recent years about writing and filming for Web 2.0 more generally. In contrast, an argument could be made for participation by progressive architects in a "Creative Commons" that makes some of their designs freely available for re-use and re-mixing.

Lovink also examines Amsterdam's Digital City project and issues about "digital empty lots" in ways that might also be relevant for the current debate about whether Second Life is empty and if virtual real estate is inevitably abandoned.

Finally, Lovink suggests that this connection between the real and the virtual opens up certain ethical dilemmas for a society, so that "democratization of computer-generated design begs the moral question of whether everything that can be designed, should be allowed to be built."

Below, you can see one perspective on Dutch urbanism and its use of resources that I shot when I was playing Jane McGonigal's virtual reality game World Without Oil, a simulation of what life would be like day by day if there were a global energy crisis.

The Good Germans

In "Whereabouts of German Media Theory" in Zero Comments, Geert Lovink argues that more German media theory should be translated into English in order to elevate the field of "media studies" with perspectives from German "media philosophy" to speak more broadly to themes and issues in the humanities more generally. As he points out, significant works by Kittler, Siegert, Flusser, Luhmann, and Theweleit are not currently available in English.

Unfortunately, for the "media philosophy" problem, those who participate in international conferences also see the talking at cross-purposes that Lovink describes in the second chapter of his book. As an attendee at last year's interesting but sometimes fragmented "Philosophy of Computer Games" conference organized by Espen Aarseth, I was often struck by the disciplinary divides between philosophers and game studies researchers that were even more obvious than the linguistic divisions between the attendees.

It's interesting that Lovink also refuses to define the term "medium" too precisely beyond characterizing his subject matter as a "raw mix of sociological, philosophical, and semiotic questions that deal with the problems of our technologically advanced culture."

Yet, for a theorist so interested in systems analysis and labor politics, Lovink is surprisingly uninterested in the practical obstacles to the task of the translator and the institutional pressures on media scholars to produce original scholarly monographs, which are so valued for tenure and promotion, rather than translations of the work of others that do little to advance an American academic career.

Escape from the Gallery

Zero Comments is also a wake-up call to the digital arts community that takes issue with the self-satisfied virtual navel-gazing that occupies so many new media artists. Geert Lovink's chapter on "The Cool Obscure: Crisis of New Media Arts" is a much needed corrective for the dozens of academic books that are dedicated to gallery shows or Joycean hypertexts that are only experienced by a handful of people in the cultural elite. As someone who has looked at state institutions as digital media makers for the better part of a decade and the uneasy relationship between computational media and democratic deliberation, I would tend to agree with Lovink's assessment that digital media need to acknowledge much more diverse audiences in the public sphere who suffer the real-world consequences of badly designed networks, databases, and user interfaces. As he writes, "Instead of taking the heroic stand of the avant-garde, many new media practitioners have chosen to simply drift away in clouds of images, texts, and URLs" so that "both science and business have successfully ignored the creative community."

I also like the fact that he frequently cites Anna Munster, the author of the terrific and yet under-read book Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, which looks closely at Cartesian ideologies and legitimates the counternarratives of Leibniz and baroque sensibilities. Although she appears nowhere by name in this chapter, Lovink's discussion of "expensive, proprietary VR installations" can't be taken as anything but a swipe at Char Davies and her ilk, about whom, in fairness, I should point out, my UCI colleague Michael Heim has written sensitively. Lovink also argues that the bio-art produced by Stelarc and other would-be cyborgs misses many of the connections to be made between art and science, particularly those suggested by the work of Bruno Latour on the social aspects of cultural and epistemological production. Lovink also acknowledges the low-tech contributions to be made by including DIY and DJ cultural practices.

At one point Lovink cites Chris Crawford's devastating summation of a typical interactive entertainment conference.

Artists have organized conferences on interactive entertainment and games, to which they always invite some representatives of the techie/games community . . . These conferences always start with an earnest declaration of the need for academia and industry to work hand in hand. Then a techie gets up and talks about what he wants from academia: students trained in 3D artwork, programming, and animation. An artsie gets up and lectures about the semiotics of Mario Brothers. A techie follows with a lecture on production techniques in the games industry. Another artsie analyzes the modalities of mimetics in text adventures. And so it goes, both sides happily talking right past each other, and neither side having the slightest interest or comprehension of the other side's work.

Of course, I think I've been at some of those conferences, mentally watching them bounce back and forth like a ping pong match after I'm done giving my paper.

Nihil Obstat

Hey voters and coders, it's time for another Virtualpolitik book review.

This time I'll be examining Geert Lovink's Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, which represents a much more sophisticated critique of Web 2.0 than books that are heavily self-promoted to mass market audiences, such as the terrible Cult of the Amateur. I'm not sure that I agree with Peter Krapp that Lovink's book "reads like a blog," even though much of it is written from the personal perspective of working closely with other digital artists and critics in sites of activity around the world. I think it would be a hard book to teach, even in a graduate seminar, even though Lovink is careful to define terms, not only because it assumes that the reader has read widely in media theory and critical theory more generally but also because it has a kind of assumed cosmopolitanism of life experience and an international viewpoint and engagement with the politics of art and the art of politics that people of a certain age who go straight from one provincialism to another in the transition from undergraduate education to graduate school probably can't relate to.

In the opening of the book, Lovink promises to offer a "general theory of blogging," which characterizes these discursive practices as historically situated in post-9/11 cynicism and the sloganism that feeds political polarities that Lovink sees at work in the virtual communities on both sides of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Although Lovink can be seen as a kind of polar opposite of Henry Jenkins, who has achieved fame celebrating "participatory" fan cultures or branded transmedia narratives, both Jenkins and Lovink agree that social media and user-generated content doesn't necessarily produce progressive political dialogue. When characterizing YouTube, Jenkins has said that "participatory culture is not always progressive." Lovink would seem to be making an even stronger statement about the radical and reactionary dynamic of blogs, which he points out "seemlessly fit into the talk radio and cable news landscape." (For a Virtualpolitik review of Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture, go here.)

In his chapter on "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse," Lovink argues that although these blogs encourage political extremism, they are simultaneously emblematic of diaristic "vague media" that lack direction and engagement with public action. At a theoretical level, Lovink clearly owes much to Michel Foucault in that he points out how blogs function as a "tool to manage the self." He also uncouples the widely promoted vision that links blogging with "citizen journalism." Lovink cites one-time Howard Dean strategist Joe Trippi to argue that in a divided electorate, blogs are important and yet marginal.

Unfortunately, he also reinterates the truism that equates social media with oral tradition, a connection that I argue can also have disastrous consequences if it blinds policy makers to the subtleties of these new genres. And in reading the first chapter, I also wish that he engaged more in the interesting debate about blogging that has been going on in journalism schools. Saying bloggers "rarely add new facts to a news story" is a gross oversimplification, even if I resent the creeping influence of what I have called "Facebook journalism" in the news media.

Getting Lucky Wander Boy

On Christmas Eve, I was handed the book Lucky Wander Boy by friends who knew about my interests in the way that mundane routines and what Michel de Certeau calls "the practices of everyday life" relate to videogames that are conventionally associated in the media with more obviously dramatic depictions of violence or sexuality or transgressive behavior. These constraints on the routines possible in the design of computational media have ideological import as well, and so -- like literary texts -- they can be useful to critics for understanding constructs of gender, race, class, and nationality.

It turns out that much of the Lucky Wander Boy book is about the classic Atari and Intellivision games of the narrator's youth, which are looked at from a pseudo-philosophical perspective. Unfortunately, I didn't find many of D.B. Weiss's insights about the procedural logic of these videogames particularly compelling, and I might guess that Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's book on A Platform Study of the Atari 2600 will end up being more novel, more theoretically sophisticated, and better argued on that score. Since I live in the hundred square block area in which most of the book's action takes place, I was also unimpressed by its depictions of life in Santa Monica, which has been the subject of a lot of classic Southern California fiction since Raymond Chandler. Instead, I was only annoyed by its thinly veiled references to local boho hangouts like Vidiots and Warszawa.

What I did find compelling about Lucky Wander Boy was the very funny send-up of the discourse practices of a typical new media start-up. The satiric commentary on how electronic communication only multiplies meaningless tasks would fit right into the book Send: The Essential Guide to E-mail for Office and Home, and the novel skewers the foibles of the Internet design process in ways that would be familiar to anyone who has ever had any contact with one of our local web/game/effects businesses.

In other words, it still might be worth assigning to students to lighten up one of those courses with a Neuromancer/Snow Crash-type reading list, especially if you are tired of assigning something like Galatea 2.2. Or it could work well as cautionary fare for a course about the design of computational media.

(Thanks to Bill Oakley for loan of the book.)

Book Nook

As part of a conversation about the editor as book designer and book designer as editor, I was very pleased to introduce Peter Lunenfeld and Lorraine Wild today at the day-long symposium sponsored by the campus's new "Design Alliance," The Book, the Brand, and the Box. Of course, I don't think that you can really talk about media studies without saying anything about print culture, so moderating this discussion felt like a natural extension of the scholarly issues about interfaces that I was already exploring.

The first Lunenfeld book I read was The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, a ground-breaking collection of stereotype busting essays of the highest intellectual caliber about matters digital that includes work by Lunenfeld, Kate Hayles, William Mitchell, Lev Manovich, Erkki Huhtamo, George Landow, my UCI colleague Mike Heim, and creator-critics such as Bob Stein and Brenda Laurel.

Just this week, I assigned students the chapter on “The Interface” from Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, which I noticed opened with an extended discussion of the significance of Lunenfeld’s work, specifically his famous interrogation of the lopsided influence of Ridley Scott has had on shaping public attitudes about technology for decades through Blade Runner (1982) and Scott's Macintosh computer ad (1984).

Lunenfeld is also the author of the influential Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media & Culturess, which I think was one of the first books to write about hypertext and virtual reality without resorting to utopian or sci-fi clichés or poststructuralist jargon. In the book Lunenfeld questions an ideology of aesthetic freedom, by looking closely at how computers shape the artistic practices and thereby sets the stage for today’s research in code studies or software studies that looks critically at questions of constraints. The artists Lunenfeld analyzes in this influential book include Char Davies, JODI, Christian Möller, Stelarc, and William Gibson.

As an interface designer, he appeared as creator and editorial director of the Mediawork project, where he produced a pamphlet series for the MIT Press that was intended to redefine the relationship between serious academic discourse and graphic design, and between book publishing and the World Wide Web. I had been reading Lunenfeld's USER in connection with some of the things said about the term "user" at the 4S and AoIR conferences this year and had been savoring its wide-ranging exploration of contemporary culture that includes graphically dramatic commentary on apocalyptic warnings, bumper sticker rhetoric, blockbuster art shows, 24/7 schedules ramped up to the speed of “25/8,” and the semiotics of equating technology and videogame play with masturbation. It was interesting to see how Lunenfeld described this polemical work as something other than a manifesto, since Lunenfeld claims that in the current mediascape “part of the excitement is that the old categories don’t hold; there’s no coherent, oppositional avant-gardes anymore. There are still cries of rage and acts of violence, but not much in the way of compelling manifestos. I’m interested in utilities anyway, not manifestos. A utility adds functionality to a software system, and can be built upon in turn by further utilities later on down the road. Utilities are evolutionary rather than revolutionary . . ."

As someone who studies both intellectual property claims and cultural narratives about theories of information, I'm looking forward to Lunenfeld’s forthcoming monograph The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: How the Computer Became Our Culture Machine. Kudos to innovative MIT editor Doug Sery for choosing yet another readable/teachable title to bring to the press.

Lunenfeld opened his talk with a wonderful image of a book whose pages were woven on a Jacquard-style loom, a copy of which you can also see here on this page from the Institute for Figuring. Like Adrian Johns, Lunenfeld is interested in how the alternative histories of computing also can be read in the alternative histories of printing manufacture. Lunenfeld described this book of prayer as a "brilliant fiasco" and "outlier in the history of information-delivery devises" that sold only sixty copies, despite its luminous presentation in silver and black thread. However, in response to the death-of-the-book debates that were going on when I was writing my dissertation, Lunenfeld argued that the book was a "highly adaptable object" and that even "dry and dusty" academic books can be enlivened by graphic presentation techniques borrowed from the design explosion taking place in the magazine world.

He showed layouts from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and the ubiquitous alphabet-city "junkie wear" leather jacket for which Baudrillard's Simulations was designed to be interior pocket-sized. He also pointed out that the once visually innovative series from Zone Books could no longer be put in the laptop bags now commonly carried by both men and women, since they were now more like "medieval manuscripts chained to a library." Lunenfeld described himself as a maker of "interstitial literature for an interstitial time" and was willing to acknowledge the importance of "chunking" and "pull quotes" to serve current practices of dilatory reading.

He closed by looking at perhaps the most controversial area of academic publishing: web delivery of content. The most radical authors in favor of the free culture model are those who like Lawrence Lessig and Chris Kelty are putting entire books from academic presses online with Creative Commons licenses, apparently without harming sales. In contrast, Lunenfeld showed what had been developed for the Mediaworks pamphlets, which included supplementary "Webtakes," such as an extraordinary web comic essay by Scott McCloud in response in to the Brenda Laurel book from the series, and delivery of content that included multimedia modes of production that enriched otherwise insufficient text, such as DJ Spooky's music+text+sticker graphics packaging.

In Lorraine Wild's talk, the editorial policies of MIT Press continued to be an important theme, since she discussed how the controversial image on the cover of the catalogue for Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution had generated considerable outrage and explication in the art blogosphere, after MIT Press rejected a restrained painting of a pile of white laundry against a hardwood floor as insufficiently attention-getting for the cover of the book.

As one of the principals of Green Dragon design and a person who helped radically revamp the curriculum of graphic design education in America in her role as a pedagogue at Cal Arts, Wild also had a lot to say about Los Angeles as a regional site for exchanging ideas and techniques. She talked about the "Ed Ruscha" effect and the way that artists could engage with industrially printed books. She also claimed that print designers were now in a position much like painters in the late nineteenth century as photography and cinema were on the rise and that working during the "birth of another medium" in the digital realm created challenges when clients wanted screens with icons rather than books. She also talked about the art catalogue business and how branding strategies could be so important for the printed matter she had designed for the Murakami show up now at MOCA that also makes copyright and intellectual property central subjects for art.

Speaking as an LA native and one who dabbles with collaborative pedagogical experiments designed to get students to think critically about the natural and built environment that surround them, perhaps the most exciting part of Wild's talk was the making of l.a. now as a collaboration between students of architecture, public policy, and design in the area. Although she described the book initially as "one giant copyright violation" with pages and pages taken off the Internet posted around a room in their first interdisciplinary session, this collection of census data, cinematic images, snippets from regional literature, etc. turned out to be a remarkably successful project, both as a publishing venture and a sadly now-dated portrait of the region.

During the question and answer period, there was considerable talk about why book design wasn't a factor in academic hiring, promotion, and tenure, with some like Catherine Liu arguing against the "deconstructive preciosity" of books like Avital Ronnell's The Telephone Book and the value of "kicking it old school" with "tough-minded" academic tomes.

Cult Following, Part Two

Obviously, there is similarity in the titles of both Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur (2007) and Theodor Roszak's The Cult of Information (1986). Both of them also claim the ethos of the cognoscenti and categorically deny that they are technophobes. Keen describes himself as "an apostate, an insider now on the outside who has poured out his cup of Kool-Aid and resigned his membership in the cult," and Roszak compares himself to the boy in the fairy tale saying that the emperor has no clothes, although he also points out that the "manuscript for this book was typed on a word processor," and that "at numerous points, the research for the text made extensive use of electronic data bases." Like Keen's book it's also full of stories from the author's professional and personal life as he explains the roots of his skepticism.

However, Roszak's reading of religious fervor around technology is considerably more subtle, in that it focuses on the "folklore" of technology and looks closely at the history of information theory and the contributions to the field of computer science and signal processing by sometimes problematic pioneers like Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. It's also a more theoretically sophisticated book: it uses the theories of Habermas rather than merely name-drops or tells anecdotes about the contemporary German philosopher. In pointing out the Weberian character of electronic bureaucracy, Roszak facilitates dialogue with scholars like Jane Fountain, who work on Weberian theory and the "virtual state." Furthermore,in its critique of educational technology, it presents a much more nuanced argument about "vested interests" instead of a tirade like that of the book version of Digital Diploma Mills by David Noble. Even twenty years later, Roszak's book is still relevant, while Keen's may not be.

Cult Following, Part One

Okay, users and musers, it's time for another Virtualpolitik book review. And this time it's a double-header, with the more recent The Cult of the Amateur going up against a tried-and-true classic, The Cult of Information.



As you can see above, Keen made a bad showing on the Colbert Report, in which he compares Web 2.0 to the Third Reich and claims "even the Nazis didn't put artists out of work." Keen goes on to assert that if no one "pays" for art then it must not have any aesthetic value. Colbert points out to Keen that the Presidency has been a much greater source of influential misinformation than distributed networks.

Ironically, Keen also sent his book tour spam to the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity, which prompted outrage about Keen's use of their online community for his anti-Web 2.0 self-promotion in a thread called "Spammer de la Silicon Valley." At the same time the iDC's own Trebor Scholz has put together a much more thoughtful critique in his course syllabus on The Social Web, which asks "Is it feasible to live ethical, meaningful lives in the context of the Social Web today?"

It is precisely these kinds of serious questions about digital sociality that Keen avoids in his light read on file-sharing culture. Much of it just repurposes the rhetoric of criminality already in the mainstream media in which the Internet is merely a conduit of the Seven Deadly Sins. (Unlike our government, at least Keen doesn't equate it with terrorism as well.)

I'm certainly leery of many aspects of Web 2.0, but Keen's book is supremely illogical at a number of critical junctures. He's right that the word "democratization" is often misapplied to networked social media that are sometimes callow get-rich-quick schemes, and that search engine technology presents an insidious threat to privacy. And the final chapter on "solutions," with the exception of the call for greater regulation, is not an entirely stupid call for hybrid print-Internet initiatives.

At one point he moralizes about how "Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and James Boswell didn't hide between aliases while debating one another." Of course, lots of great literature was written under a pseudonym, particularly -- as Bitch PhD's Tedra Osell has pointed out -- literature written by women. What about Sor Juana, George Sand, George Eliot, or the Brontë sisters who wrote under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell? It's noticeable, actually, how little of the "great art" that Keen declares to be in danger is written by women.

His claims about the threats to the academy are also problematic. He bemoans the status of Encyclopedia Britannica, but doesn't acknowledge that the decline of encyclopedic writing by academics has as much to do with tenure and reward systems that no longer recognize work done for reference works as it does with the existence of rival upstart Wikipedia. Then he totally loses me when he talks about the terrible effects that custom publishing has wrought in higher education. As the Writing Director for a large-enrollment first-year course, I'm grateful not to be stuck with irrelevant readers or writing textbooks that don't address the ambitious inquiry-based humanities instruction that we provide.

He also may be over-investing print in stability and authority, given that historians like Adrian Johns point out that ink-and-paper media were also fractious and contentious spaces.

As the owner of a small apartment building, who also has to periodically rent apartments through Craigslist, I'm not nostalgic for the old days of newsprint classified ads in the way that Keen is. He should be old enough to remember that these ads were enormously time-consuming and didn't allow for easy exchanges of different kinds of information between contractual parties.

Finally, it seems strange to me that Keen won't acknowledge the role that media conglomeration has played in the struggles of national newspapers and other media ventures that focus on return for shareholders rather than serving a particular segment of the geographical population.

Not Diploma-tic

Speaking of automation and higher education, on the plane flight home from Berkeley I finished reading David F. Noble's Digital Diploma Mills. Of course, who couldn't help but enjoy the prose of a book with passages such as this:

The monotonal mantras about our inevitable wired destiny, the prepackaged palaver of silicon snake-oil salesmen, echoed through the halls of academe, replete with sophomoric allusions to historical precedent (the invention of writing and the printing press) and sound-bites about the imminent demise of the "sage on the stage" and "bricks and mortar" institutions. But today, alas, the wind is out of their sails, their momentum broken, their confidence shaken.

But I had a lot of difficulty with Noble's arguments against making course websites into a venue for public information and his moralistic defense of copyright as a public institution. (Regarding copyright debates, I'll get to my reactions to Mark Helprin's "A Great Idea Lives Forever, Shouldn't Its Copyright" later this week, as well as the wiki that Lawrence Lessig's wiki that rebuts its arguments.) I'm certainly wary of nondisclosure agreements or secret contracts between corporate software vendors and universities, although right now the issues that Noble raises may be most salient to the Google digitization debate.

Yet Noble overlooks obvious alternatives to proprietary courseware, such as digital coursework based on a creative commons or open source models, or the existence of the international community exploring electronic educational environments in the 1990s. He also doesn't consider the value of hybrid education in which digital materials are integrated into live teaching. Moreover, he actually throws more obstacles in front of the collaborations that I would argue the digital university will need to survive, which I describe in this paper about Virtualpolitik and higher education.

Finally, I thought his epilogue about September 11th didn't make sense to me, in which he argued that academics should be even more secretive about their course materials in an environment of political surveillance and suspicion. I taught my first course about the rhetoric of the Internet in the immediate wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and I thought the environment of openness that I tried to foster around the course materials -- some of which were used by a composition textbook company without permission or compensation and even repurposed for other courses -- is healthier for higher education and public culture more generally. (By the way, I officially give permission here for others to use those September 11th materials here and will try to get around to slapping a creative commons license on the site.)

The Pictures are in English

This is what the flight attendants said to American passengers as they handed out Dutch newspapers aboard my flight home.

On the way back to LAX, I was also able to consider some other pictures as I read the new book-length study of the virtual reality artist Char Davies. Laurie McRobert's Char Davies' Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality makes a number of interesting claims. One of the singular aspects of the book is that it poses a kind of thought experiment about what Heidegger would think about the different design philosophies of different New Media artists. It also attacks what she calls technological romanticism at the core and argues for the importance of natural bodies and environments. Unlike Mark Nunes, who has tried to recuperate the term "cyberspace," McRoberts associates these forms of virtual spatial representation and the language to describe them with more quotidian exchanges that leave users moored in the world of commerce. She also challenges Cartesian norms about geometrical representations, much like Anna Munster does in a recent book. I didn't necessarily agree with her assertions about gender and technology -- in that she makes an essentializing claim that women need different kinds of computers to be self-actualized -- and her arguments about the harmfulness of videogames to the young, particularly since digital media artist Bill Viola is now using the genre for new purposes with Tracy Fullerton. Finally, I felt like the book lost some of its momentum in the ending where the writer devotes too many pages to neurology and psychopharmacology for a book about ontology and aesthetics. Nonetheless, I found this book to be a very stimulating read, and I am grateful to my colleague philosopher Michael Heim for recommending it. In particular, I enjoyed learning about Davies' corporate history as an executive with Softimage.