Some links

Last week we talked about some fairly scandalous phenomena like Carrier IQ and Siri's curious pro-life choices. I've since run into a couple of links that help explain both situations... and in Siri's case it shows the linguistic weaknesses of AI present in a program touted for being an advanced, thinking bit of software.

How to Talk to Siri

What is Carrier IQ

Rainbow's End

Vernor Vinge doesn’t create a world as much as he augments our own – and in this way we experience a differently mediated augmented-reality like the citizens of 2025 San Diego.  Technology is such that the world is experienced through digital interfaces and much of what we’ve talked about regarding web 2.0 is woven seamlessly into the everyday lives (and clothes) of every citizen (with few exceptions among technophobes who opt out of those experiences).

In this reality the concept of literacy shifts so that those who are most capable with technology are the most literate which contrasts well with our protagonist who stands as a fading relic of what was once considered the apex of literacy. Robert Gu is an interesting main character with some dynamic experiences: a world-renowned poet who’s mind decays and voice is silenced by Alzheimer’s until he is eventually called out of his coma and hyper-healed by the kind of technology that makes him as irrelevant as he was while in his coma. After some resistance (and clinging to a 30+ year-old operating system) he finally begins to embrace and enjoy the technology that he once feared (even making advancements in certain areas) – reclaiming his literacy.  

For me, the most interesting themes in the book were those that seem to be nearest: superintelligence and augmented reality. Superintelligence might seem a long way off, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t being actively pursued. In the Nick Carr article that we had to read, he included some quotes by the founders of Google:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Augmented reality, on the other hand, already exists in very primitive forms. In some sense our ability to experience locations through check-in programs like Foursquare, Facebook, or Google augment our reality in various ways. Applications like Google Goggles give us a digital lens through which we view the world and gather information about it. Furthermore these programs often give various awards for using them which encourages users to experience digitally-mediated realities.

This is a far cry from the kind of augmented reality that Vinge describes (which reminded me of Minority Report in a lot of ways), but there are early attempts at more significantly augmented realities. Lego and Sony have experimented with augmented reality and have come up with some pretty interesting results. And, under the banner of creepy coincidence, the University of Washington is workingon HUD contact lenses and they are testing them on… rabbits(!).

I surely hope that Karl Pilkington isn’t right about the rest his ideas for the future:

UPDATE: Here is a deeper look into the AR contact lenses: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0

On Pond Skating and Scuba Diving

I wasn't exactly sure how to navigate the many links that were provided for us, but with respect to the few responses to Carr's article that I did read, I think Clay Shirky raised some important points. Addressing Carr's claim that there will be (and already has been) some cultural sacrifices that have been made with the changing "media landscape," Shirky writes:

...the question we need to be asking isn’t whether there is sacrifice; sacrifice is inevitable with serious change. The question we need to be asking is whether the sacrifice is worth it or, more importantly, what we can do to help make the sacrifice worth it. And the one strategy pretty much guaranteed not to improve anything is hoping that we’ll somehow turn the clock back. This will fail, while neither resuscitating the past nor improving the future.

While I appreciate a lot of what Carr has said about the internet's overall effect on the way we think and read, I do think that he approaches the subject from a certain kind of golden-age orientation (not unlike Postman), which ignores the fact that change has already happened and there isn't any going back. At this point the only hope that Carr has is to attempt to subvert the medium and use it to encourage "deep reading" (which has been done to some respect with long-form, online journalism).

Interestingly, I tried to follow a link to something Andrew Sullivan (easily my favorite journalist) had written on the subject and found this page. Sadly it seems that this "news wall" has fully embraced the pond-skater format and uses visuals to attract and direct viewers (and not necessarily readers), to important stories. There does seem to be some disconnect between a visual index and a typical news story.

In the end I was able to find a quote from Sullivan on the subject that I think takes a moderate approach to the issue that would be worth exploring:

“...are you still reading this, or are you about to click on another link?...We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.”

A Few More Interesting Links

• The digital revolution has brought about new media genres including the supercut - a genre that I think may have appeared in Postman's nightmares. 
• An interesting look at the design of the future and the functionality of digital tools.
• Hashtagging and collective intelligence.

Online Searches: Quantity vs. Quality

An interesting look into internet-literacy and the younger generations (in)ability to discriminate within search results. An introductory excerpt:

High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

Google and Online Journalism

This is an interesting update that Google is making to its online journalism. It seems to show an appreciation for news-oriented ethos, while reducing the friction between user and information:

Great journalism takes more than facts and figures -- it takes skilled reporters to knit together compelling stories. Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article's context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them. Whole communities can form around prominent contributors, which is why we started showinginformation about content creators next to their material in Google Search.

Accordingly, Google News is rolling out more information about journalists over the next several weeks, starting with English-language editions. When reporters link their Google profile with their articles, Google News now shows the writer’s name and how many Google+ users have that person in their circles. For the lead article for each story, Google News also shows that reporter’s profile picture and enables readers to add them to their Google+ circles right from the Google News homepage.

Social Networks and Teenage Maturation

I enjoyed reading danah boyd's piece on social network sites, and while it focused primarily on MySpace, she makes some relevant points that should be considered in a discussion of Facebook (since MySpace is practically dead for everyone who isn't in an indie-band). She raises a lot of important issues but I found the "Why There?" section most interesting. The question basically asks why do teenagers flock en masse to these social network sites - and the answer seems to be: because we've kicked them out of every other public space and those that they are allowed to participate in are adult-regulated. There used to be spaces (malls, rollerskating rinks, etc) where teenagers could enjoy the company of their peers in a relatively unregulated, public place, but as boyd points out these places have either fallen off the grid (e.g., rollerskating rinks) or restricted access to teenagers (e.g., malls and movie theatres). With nowhere left to turn, teens have flocked to the internet and populated online communities.

There were some interesting commonalities between these spaces and their digital replacements. A heavily modified profile and online persona isn't unlike the teens who would bring a change of clothes to the mall that their parents wouldn't let them leave the house in. While these places were commercially-oriented, they did provide a relatively accessible space wherein groups of friends could be themselves with one another for a period of time without the explicit pressure to conform to the structures inherent in the institutions (e.g., groups of friends could walk around the mall for hours without buying anything, and once you paid to get into Skateland, you could just sit at a table and talk for three hours). Likewise a social component to a dieting site allows likeminded people to talk about television shows and parenting tips. In the end, it doesn't matter where you are but who you are with (and who is watching).

What interests me, however, is not the similarities but the differences between online and these "physically-oriented" communities. Who you hung out with at the mall or which friends you invited skating could create a significant amount of drama at the lunch table on Monday. At the time when boyd wrote this article, that kind of tension existed in social network sites (e.g., MySpace's top 8 friends). But as Facebook and Twitter have clobbered all other social networks, they've eliminated a lot of those politics. boyd talks about teens maturing through trial and error on these sites the way they would have in physical spaces before - but I wonder if the stakes are really as high. Comments can be deleted, profiles can be changed, and what is private and public can be changed with a click.

This gets into something I'm working on for my independent study regarding frictionless online experiences. In sum, the heavy hitters in the digital world want to make online experiences as "frictionless" (their word) as possible - significantly reducing the kind of resistance that real-world experience might offer. At the most basic level, for example, writing happy birthday on someone's wall is significantly easier than buying and sending a birthday card (and rather than watching a calendar, Facebook will notify you when a birthday is coming up). This kind of friction-reduction allows a user to maintain far more relationships than one could hope to cultivate offline. So my question is: does this kind of community or public space really offer the kind of trial-and-error-experiences that boyd suggests are so important in teenage maturation and socialization? And what about the explosion of adult participation in Facebook? Eventually going to Skateland became uncool - but largely because I had other things to do. But with the ease of accessibility and the integration with commonly used tools, will a person who started using Facebook in high school decide it isn't cool six years later? I'm "friends" with enough Facebook users entering into proper adulthood to suggest otherwise. 

New Media and Democracy

Jenny Kidd's Are New Media Democratic? is a neat little article wherein she tells the two narratives of new media. The first approaches the question positively and suggests that democracy is a constituent part of the internet - both in its inception and infrastructure. It gives everyone a voice and isn't moderated or owned by any one government and works in a bottom-up model rather than a top-down hierarchy. The second narrative concludes that new media are not democratic. They are capitalistic (if not by nature, then by design), which has led to "Big Media" institutions that control, in one way or another, the flow of information (e.g., Google, Facebook, IE8). Additionally, to say that no one government controls the internet is not to say that particular governments can't control their citizens' access to the internet. So, for example, while China has the majority of web users, they also employ more than 30,000 internetofficers to police users and restrict access to certain websites and Google search results (and, of course, the US government has the freedom to shut downsites that break US law). So the proposition of the first narrative - that no one can turn off the internet for users - is only true in a sense. If a person only sought to access certain portions of the internet that were subjected to government restrictions, then for that user, the government would have functionally shut off their internet (and, of course, a user's ISP retains the freedom to shut down their internet if they deem it appropriate). 

I liked Kidd's approach in providing two narratives that are both "true" in their information. In a sense her two narratives were also told in the Carr and Rosen debate from last week , albeit with more analysis. I happen to hear the truth of the second, more negative narrative a bit more loudly, but in true rhetorical fashion the debate swings on what aspects receive the most emphasis. It is ostensibly true that people can speak their minds much more easily on the web through blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, but if nobody is listening (as Kidd suggests in her second narrative), then what is the difference between web-published rants and those of the unheard TV viewer? Without a ripple-effect or some kind of public discourse then both forms of ranting are an exercise of free speech, but not necessarily democracy in any actualized sense. 

Carr and Rosen Debate

The Economist hosted a written debate between Jay Rosen and Nicholas Carr on the topic of the the internet's impact on journalism. Rosen sees the internet's impact as largely positive while Carr disagrees. The debate was broken up into four sections and below is my summary of Carr's points:

Opening Remarks

Carr opens by reporting the declining number of journalists employed by print-based news organizations. As more people go to their search engines for news, he argues, the less newspapers make in advertising and sales and the more journalists they have to let go. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem for people (unless you are one of the aforementioned, recently unemployed journalists); technology necessarily renders some jobs obsolete – we don't see many blacksmiths and typewriter repair shops anymore for a reason. However, Carr suggests that this decline in journalists reduces both institutional accountability (e.g., corporations, government, etc.), and fact checking and quality control within news organizations.

His second, and last, main point in his opening statement is simply that for all that has been lost in traditional print-based news, the internet-grown substitutions have not proportionately filled the gap.

Rebuttal

Apart from questioning some of Rosen's assumptions and definitions, Carr makes one primary point: rather than decreasing “pack journalism” as Rosen suggests, online journalism has actually increased the trend. He uses the examples of the Casey Anthony trial and the Anthony Weiner scandal – everyone was reporting on two domestic stories which hardly constitute informed citizens. Quoting the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, he suggests that “the new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.”

Closing Statements

Carr's final point is the simplest, and in my opinion the most important: opinions about online journalism are shaped by accessibility. He points out that Rosen spreads himself very thin all over the internet, and he is part of the elite in this way. He knows where to get information and has the time to seek after and interact with it. Rosen talks about the success of online journalism because of its democratic-orientation and ability to spark community-wide debates. According to Carr, this assumes too much. At the end of the day, the only people left debating issues and representing democracy are the elite who have access and time.

As a personal and anecdotal example, I've engaged in a number of online debates in comment sections, but ultimately the person who loses is whoever has to leave for work first.   

Networked Journalism, Postman, and What That Means for Your Work-Week

I couldn’t help but read The Value of Networked Journalism in light of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and particularly his chapter entitled, “Now... This.” Postman laments the fragmentation that is necessarily present in television-mediated journalism and demonstrates how the entertainment-oriented news had (at that point in the 80s) already infiltrated print media (as demonstrated by USA Today in particular). In a lot of ways, Beckett’s piece offers an alternative that should satisfy many (though not all) of Postman’s critiques.

It is important to begin with what seemed like a throw-away line from Beckett, but I think is important observation in any conversation with Postman’s writings: “Networked journalism is creating - or some would say reflecting - a new relationship between the journalist and the story and the public” (207). For anyone who has read Postman on budding technologies, this is an important point to make. Postman often overlooked the culture’s influence over the technologies and mediums they created and looked at things like television as outside agents working culture over. Not only would I want to echo other scholars who have observed that technology wells up from within culture, but I would want to be a part of the “some” that Beckett mentions here who see networked journalism as a resultant phenomenon and not a creative one. For all the speculation that Postman did concerning the future of news-media, Beckett demonstrates the actual state of things - and Postman wasn’t wrong about everything.

The most important aspect to networked journalism (from a Postman perspective) is that it allows for more in depth interaction. Postman recognized the “Now... This” nature of television news where coverage of killings or natural disasters were always quickly followed by a commercial about toilet paper or a bubbly weatherman pointing to smiley-faced sun icons. His point was that television journalism was sensational and entertaining and therefore short, fragmented, and anti-intellectual - the viewer was forced not to think about any particular story for too long.

After the inception of live-blogging, Beckett recognized “that there was an appetite for a more complex form of coverage” (207). He goes on to speak of networked journalism in general: “Unlike a TV news channel it allows the reader to control their consumption of the flow of news in a much more proactive way” (208). Networked journalism puts power back into the hands of the viewers and allows them to explore stories more thoroughly than a television snippet between commercial breaks would. In this way networked journalism answers Postman’s primary critique of “Now... This” news.

Interestingly, however, Postman inadvertently addressed Twitter-mediated news. Beckett talks about the strength of micro-blogging and its frequent use in networked journalism, and of course anyone who heard anything about the raid on Osama Bin Laden (and his consequent death) knows how important Twitter can be in journalism. Without negating the usefulness of Twitter and its role in journalism, I have to quote a section from Postman’s chapter on news when he is talking about USA Today’s television-influenced style:

The paper’s Editor-in-Chief, John Quinn, has said: “We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to win prizes. They don’t give awards for the best investigative paragraph.” Here is an astonishing tribute to the resonance of television’s epistemology: In the age of television, the paragraph is becoming the basic unit of news in print media. Moreover, Mr. Quinn need not fret too long about being deprived of awards. As other newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for the best investigative sentence. (Amusing Ourselves to Death pg. 112)

It seems like Beckett wouldn’t have too much to disagree about here. Newspapers have followed after USA Today and with the emergence of networked journalism the sentence is quickly becoming the basic unit of news in print media. How long before Postman’s prophecy is realized and an award is given for best investigative sentence?

****As far as my research interests are concerned I remain interested in asking Postman-like questions of Facebook (e.g., what kinds of content does Facebook appropriately carry? Can Facebook effectively transmit important cultural conversations? Is it an important cultural conversation in itself?). I am also interested, from a pragmatic standpoint, in updating my teaching philosophy that I had to do for RWS 609 so that it incorporates some of the points made in our readings that inadvertently made a case for a rhetorical education.

Tweets for Education?

Will Richardson approaches Twitter from a rather utopian posture whereby students can collaboratively learn 140 characters at a time. He bases a lot of his argument on his own experiences following other professionals which seems to illustrate a generation gap more than a new educational possibility.


Consider the top followed Twitter accounts and whether or not Twitter is for entertainment or education. And how do Twitter comments translate into other mediums? I concede the rest of my time to Josh Groban:

Utopian Tagging and the New iPhone 4S (oh... and Chris Cooley for good measure)

Our readings about tagging painted a beautiful picture of non-hierarchically organized knowledge and invited us into a world wherein knowledge is socially constructed through tags and their close cousins. new iPhone. While both authors gave some lip service to the obvious possibility of an incorrectly tagged post, neither of them dealt with the commercial motivations behind tagging - as if everyone uses tags to add to the social-bin-of-knowledge. iPhone 4S. Chris Cooley. 


Of course, tags also have some influence on where your post (or photos, videos, etc.) end up within a search engine's results (whether generally in Google, or within a community-specific search engine like Blogger or Flickr). new iPhone. At a rather innocent level, it could just be that people want their posts read more frequently but I can't help but notice at the top of my post-editor right now is a tab that reads: Monetize. Chris Cooley. iPhone 4S. Depending on how you have a site set up, more hits from search engines could mean more money for the tagger. 


Google is kind enough to let us in on what the most common searches are for any particular day, and today's happen to be "new iPhone" and "Chris Cooley." I talked to a popular blogger who received hundreds of thousands of hits a month from all of the world who also happened to make a little bit of money from allowing ads and linking to specific stores where people could buy items he mentioned - tools that he opted to include in his blog - and he said that the monetizing tools changed the way he tagged and composed his blog. new iPhone. Do any commercial considerations have to be considered before we look to a new digital way of compiling and organizing information? Is it any different outside the digital space? Chris Cooley.


I read the articles favorably, but I do think there are some questions that we should ask before we fully embrace the web-like, tag-dependent organization found on the internet.


For a real example of how I would use tags in a blog you are encouraged to visit my other blog. new iPhone Chris Cooley. 


Also I suggest taking a tour of Google Zeitgeist - it is pretty interesting. 

Blackboard as a Teaching and Learning Tool

In college teachers would often post notes and assignments on Blackboard in an attempt to make classroom and administrative materials more accessible. It also listed fellow students’ email addresses and allowed for online interactions through discussion boards. When I left college I thought I had seen the last of Blackboard. I finished up a M.A. program at a school that didn’t use the system at all and am now in a program that has used it fairly frequently.

Blackboard makes some assumptions and shapes education and interaction between users in a lot of ways that likely go unnoticed. On the surface it is a nice tool for document dissemination and it provides a space where important information is just a login away. But I think there are some real problems with Blackboard by design – that is to say that it doesn’t even have to be abused to be detrimental.

In college I had some teachers abuse Blackboard through over-reliance on it as an information-transmitter. All of the teacher’s PowerPoint slides (with their notes) were available to be printed off, and since that is all that was covered in class – there was really no need to show up; I can read all by myself. In this case the teacher wasn’t a teacher as much as they were an information-gatherer and examination-proctor. Even without an over-reliance on the technology it seems to suggest that students, to varying degrees, don’t need teachers as much as they need to be fed information (because it would be too hard for the student to go out and look for the information themselves).

Blackboard also seems to establish some interesting dynamics between users. Unlike a Wiki page, Blackboard is primarily manipulated (with respect to design and content) by the teacher. If there is a discussion board available the students can comment on it or email one another, but the nature of the content and how it is presented/accessed is determined by the teacher/facilitator. We’ve talked in other classes about the danger of teachers being stuck in unassailable, ivory towers and I wonder if Blackboard’s lack of direct student-teacher interaction helps construct the base of those towers. Furthermore, discussion boards hardly mimic real-life conversation and turn-taking patterns which means that regardless how thoughtful a discussion between students may be on Blackboard, it isn’t really training them to articulate themselves in the civil arena, face-to-face. It also disembodies the speakers in ways that make it hard to be a sympathetic interlocutor and ascertain meaning. People are forced to rely on emoticons to transmit actual feelings or motivations behind text and it is received through a computer screen and not a real person. Face-to-face interaction allows for contextualized meanings and quick clarifications that Blackboard discussions don’t lend themselves to. However, those discussion boards are particularly good at getting responses from people who are either shy or otherwise conversationally overpowered in a traditional classroom so there is a beneficial power shift when discussions are held online (though there should be some consideration made for students who may not be able to access or use Blackboard as easily as others which creates an entirely different power struggle). 

My real concern with Blackboard has been articulated in part here, and especially here. The latter article relies heavily on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but both argue in part that mediums build up expectations in users – and in this case a digital medium used for education can often, though unintentionally, establish a cognitive expectation of entertainment. Their specific concern is over distance-education (which seems very similar to an abusive, over-reliance on Blackboard), but a lot of what they borrow and accommodate from Postman is still applicable.

Postman was worried that the entertainment model was dominating the American discourse-landscape through the popularization of the television medium. Everything from game shows to political debates to church services was being broadcast on television which resulted in their being reduced to passively-received bits of entertainment. For Postman, the digital medium was so powerful, and so bypassed critical analysis, that the only tools viewers had for watching a political debate, for example, were those that they had cultivated watching game shows. The digital medium relied on style over substance since it was primarily visual and people went to the television medium expecting to be entertained. So how are we to understand a learning system that is computer-mediated?

I think, in a lot of ways, the same thing should concern Blackboard users. On a theoretical level we should consider what kinds of expectations a user brings to the computer medium. How are computers most commonly used? How long does a user spend on any one screen when using a computer? If we use computers primarily for email and Facebook, then are we able to flip a cognitive switch that allows us to engage with a discussion or lecture notes for longer than we would spend on a friend’s profile? Practically speaking, a teacher who puts anything on a computer-mediated system has to know that that information is competing with countless other distractions calling to the student from the 20 other tabs open in the browser. I think it is likely that students will be more passive when dealing with information on Blackboard, not just because it is visual – as Postman would argue – but because the internet is a distracting place and we’re conditioned to give into those distractions and move quickly from one thing to another.

I like to be able to reprint my syllabus, look up notes that I’ve misplaced, and find email addresses quickly – but I do have some serious reservations about Blackboard as a learning tool and the model of education and interaction that it constructs.

From Without or Within?

I conveniently ran into a different cultural manifestation of Facebook and given my last post thought it might be appropriate to link to it:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20107794-93/facebooks-kosher-twin-separates-users-by-gender/

Postman, Thamus, and Facebook (again)

I like Neil Postman; I’m sympathetic to many of his concerns insofar as they can be applied to new media today – and perhaps that’s why I find him so frustrating at times. I’ve been going through his Amusing Ourselves to Death for another class and while he can sound a bit extreme at times in that book, I thought that in the opening chapter to Technology, Literacy, and Progress he took some arguments to a hyperbolic level without letting his readers in on the fun.

Using an excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus Postman accommodates Thamus’s concerns about writing (as a new technology) to Postman’s own time and the flourishing of new technologies (particularly the computer and television). His argument is not so much that these new technologies will damage our memory and knowledge (these conclusions, according to Postman and Thamus are moot points) – rather Postman suggests that these technologies are paradigm-changers that significantly alter the way in which we understand concepts like memory and knowledge (as well as everything from politics to love).

At times Postman sounds like he is favoring archaic definitions of words and lamenting their malleability while blaming changes in language entirely on technology – as if language was not prone to fluctuation within oral cultures. But at the same time there is something deeper than definitions that technologies can change. I have written elsewhere about how Facebook has great potential to detrimentally change the way we understand larger concepts. What is our Facebook generation going to consider “news-worthy” when their primary interface for Facebook interactions is a “News Feed” that is filled with everything from Farmville scores to friend updates and inside jokes (with links to “actual news” occasionally interspersed). The infamous “Like” button (interestingly synonymous with the thumbs-up symbol) is another interesting test case. Obviously “liking” something can have a number of different meanings and motivations on Facebook. My “likes” are often political: I use them to maintain relationships and fulfill obligations. They can also mean “I’m too lazy to actually interact with this post” or “I know exactly how she said that!” or “That’s funny” or “What an idiot”. More could be said about the fact that your only options on Facebook are silence, comments, or like; there is no room for a convenient dislike and it hardly affords itself to the hard work of love. Much has been said about these things and more (consider friends, communities, relationships, etc.), but the point is that it is hard to disagree with Postman’s conclusions even if arguments seem a bit silly.

Lastly, I just want to juxtapose two quotes: one from this piece and one from last week’s Bolter reading. Postman follows the Ong and Havelock line of thinking that gives technology a certain sense of agency where writing, for example, is responsible for impoverished memories. At one point Postman speaks of the “early stages of a technology’s intrusion into culture” as if it were a rodent that steadily destroys a garden of its own volition (35). Culture remains helpless as technology forcefully subdues her from without. Bolter takes a radically different approach when he writes: “It is not a question of seeing writing as an external technological force that influences or changes cultural practice; instead, writing is always a part of culture… they are not separate agents that can act on culture from the outside” (19).

Facebook didn’t happen to us. We demonstrated a need and once it was filled we continued to shape it as it shaped us. Technology and culture share a cyclical relationship but it is not as if they are two equal parties. The fact that technologies can’t be understood apart from the cultures from which they sprouted should be obvious when we see how the same technologies are used or manifested in different cultures. Google is used (and designed) differently in China than it is elsewhere in the world. In global technologies (e.g., YouTube) it is easy to see marked differences in how different cultures use the same space (e.g., content, frequency, participation, duration, etc.).

I think Postman has a lot of valid concerns, but I wish he’d get to them in a more palatable fashion. As a final case-in-point, despite his missteps along the way, he finishes with this seemingly incontrovertible conclusion: “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop” (39, italics original). 

Ong Applied

The text that we were asked to interact with this week is a story preserved within an oral culture about a boy who became king and his fantastical victory over his own handicap. Sundiata was a 7 year-old boy who couldn’t use his legs and our text gives two versions of his story. The first version was recast in a typical western structure while the second is a more faithful rendition of the story (as told by a different griot in the village). Unsurprisingly, locating the characteristics that Ong noted about narratives in oral cultures was much easier in the second narrative than the first.

The first version has aggregate descriptions (e.g., “stiff-legged king; wicked queen mother”) and an obvious, agonistic turning point (in Sassouma’s insulting Sogolon Kedjou), but other markers are lacking.[1]

The second version keeps the participatory structure intact and therefore fits one of Ong’s characteristics in form alone; hardly a line gets told without the audience’s refrain of “indeed” (or some variation). The second most obvious characteristic that is present in the second narrative is the use of repetition. The majority of the second stanza is a word-for-word repeat of what immediately preceded it and several times there are lines that are repeated right after another (e.g., “And upwards drew himself” in stanza 7).

A significant amount of space in the second narrative is given to the mother’s prayer which seems to be composed of rhetorical questions that characterize an aggregative approach to narratives. The “If he be/If he is” questions are not actual investigations but are designed to “assure that [he be/is], to keep the aggregate intact, not really to question or cast doubt on the attribution[s]” (Ong, pg. 33).  

If Ong’s categories are legitimate they would seem to offer hermeneutical insight to oral tales that might otherwise be subjected to exegetical tools commonly used in literate societies for written stories.

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[1] In fact, as the story comes to a close, I expected a more “additive” structure in the final few paragraphs and instead the narrative relied on several subordinate clauses. 

The Oral Culture of Text-Dependent Facebook

Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy continues to fascinate me. His third chapter, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” was an interesting investigation of sound generally and the psychodynamics of primary oral cultures. In oral cultures, which lack any conception of writing by definition, communication relies on sound and gestures. Oral expression is, according to Ong, an impermanent occurrence. When a movie is paused there is still an image, but when a song is paused there is no more sound.[1] As Ong puts it: “sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (28).

He goes on to explore what this premise means for oral cultures in contrast to literate cultures that rely on silent texts. Recollection in literate societies simply involves looking something up or backtracking on a page, however oral cultures organized information differently – relying on rhythms, patterns, and mnemonics for easier recollection.[2] According to Ong, this type of intellectual organization precludes certain kinds of critical analyses and types of thinking which literate cultures can engage in. In fact, Ong suggests that within oral cultures cliché, proverbial-like sayings “are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them” (31).

Statements like this are what prompted me to write in my margins some variation of “what about today?” Earlier Ong had stated that “sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication” (30). I’m curious how statements like these can be assessed and applied to today’s culture which is primarily visual and where most composition occurs online. Interestingly, as Ong went on to describe certain characteristics of expressions and thoughts within oral cultures it seemed to me that there were a number of curious similarities with Facebook.

Facebook, of course, is inhabited exclusively by literate people and provides a space wherein people connect and communicate primarily through printed words. Nevertheless, it is a unique space (similar to Ong’s “human lifeworld”) where texts take on the embodied characteristics of oral communication. Ong talks about texts as decontextualized and inhuman and uses the list as a consummate example where names can be listed as mere, neutral representations for actual humans. At first glance, Facebook employs lists of the kind that only literate cultures could construct and yet they are far more contextualized. The most prominent list that a Facebook user interacts with is the Friends List, but the names are anything but neutrally-oriented. Not only are they always accompanied by their profile picture but hovering over any name on the list shows you the amount and select pictures of mutual friends as well as the option to send them a personal message. These lists are presented in the context of human relationships and activity which characterizes the genealogical or political lists in oral culture more similarly than it does a list of American presidents in a reference book.

I think Facebook communication also shares oral cultures’ pragmatic uses of language (e.g., “LOL; Friend me!”),  and is similarly empathetic and participatory (e.g., comments, likes, immediately accessible author profiles, etc.), however, the most interesting similarity between the world of Facebook and oral cultures is Ong’s description of the latter’s homeostasis.  Ong suggests that “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (39). Facebook is temporally-oriented to prefer newer information.[3] Whether it is the ever-changing News Feed or a person’s Wall, as information gets older and is replaced by newer updates, Facebook deems the newer information more relevant and eventually pushes the old information into the realm of “older posts.” Present (read: relevant) interactions with old information is recorded accordingly in the News Feed, but sooner or later the information is (practically) forgotten rather than archived.

Ong’s examples of changing genealogies is perfectly analogous to the ease with which I can de-friend someone, get married, or reject a family tree offer regardless of the information recorded in government archives. If such a change suits my present purposes, then altering Facebook-relationships is as easy as changing the words to a genealogical narrative.

I’m still working through how and if these similarities can answer my earlier questions, but it is interesting to see how Facebook – an ostensibly text-oriented space – can share characteristics which, according to Ong, belong distinctly to oral cultures.

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[1] Communicative gestures rely on their close association with these “effervescent” sounds and therefore, presumably, suffer from the same degree of impermanence though Ong’s focus is aural.

[2] This relates back to last chapter and the work that had been done with Homer’s Illiad and the surprising number of cliché phrases and patterns that were employed (which proved to be a significant piece of evidence that convinced some that Homer was illiterate).

[3] This preference is another similar concept listed elsewhere by Ong; see pg. 35