im here

An End and a Beginning...

2008-07-27T15:21:00.002-06:00

So now that the topic of my blog has transformed into my day job as a doctoral student, I find most of my reflections on the topic worm their way into my academic papers instead of online. So this blog has been dying a slow death over the last year. As a result, I've made a decision. It's time for an end, and a beginning. This blog is done, but a new one, on my experiences and reflections on the writing life, has begun. And so, for now, I will say goodbye to this blog and direct you instead to my new blog, "Still and Still Moving." For those of you with a feed reader, the address is http://deborahleiter.blogspot.com See you over at the new spot!

A couple of great quotes...

2008-04-04T13:14:00.006-06:00

From my Facebook "Deep Thought" generator: “To me, truth is not some vague, foggy notion. Truth is real. And, at the same time, unreal. Fiction and fact and everything in between, plus some things I can’t remember, all rolled into one big ‘thing.’ This is truth, to me.”
—Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey

Deb's thoughts: This one just made me laugh. Especially since it's so similar to my thoughts on the matter after an MA in lit. and almost-one-year of a PhD in communication. Thankfully I've spent a lot of time reading and analyzing poetry, so I'm okay with paradox.

From the blog "95 Theses", by way of Cindy (thanks, Cindy!): "In a conversation between Waugh and Graham Greene, recorded by Christopher Sykes, Greene described the plot of his then impending novel The Quiet American, and observed that it would be “a relief not to write about God for a change.” To which Waugh rejoined, “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you. Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”

Deb's thoughts: Again, it's funny. Yet profound. I'm feeling poetic at the moment, though, rather than poetry-analytic (perhaps because I'm in the middle of analysis for a paper), so I won't overanalyze the implications of this one. Just enjoy...

Please Pretend It's My Mom's Refrigerator

2008-03-03T19:13:00.011-06:00

Okay, so it's been a really long time since I posted here. So what have I been doing, you ask? My slightly stressed PhD student self would say, perhaps, that I've been really busy writing papers about creativity and communication in the digital age rather than blogging about the topics.

It's true, actually, but it's only most, not all, of what I've been doing. I've written a few other things too. They're mostly linkable things, so I thought I'd briefly pretend this space was a spot on my mom's refrigerator and post the links:

This isn't so recent, but the linkableness is relatively recent. In running a vanity search on Google, I discovered the PDF version of my University of Saskatchewan MA Thesis on connections between T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Henry David Thoreau's Walden (successfully defended last August) is now Google-able. (Not only Google-able, but if you input the words "four quartets walden" it's the first result in Google Scholar. Ah, how interestingly the search engine is changing the way texts are indexed and privileged.)

Now that you know it's out there, I'm sure you'll all be glued to the screen, compulsively reading until the momentous conclusion. If anyone does want to read it, here are links to versions someone posted online of Four Quartets and Walden for textual context (try saying THAT 10 times fast :).

I've been writing a lot for catapult magazine lately (well, relatively speaking--2 articles this year plus one in each of the next 2 issues). (If you haven't heard of catapult, it's a very thoughtful online magazine about intersections between culture and Christian viewpoints.)

The most recent one I wrote was about international cooking and stereotypes and includes a recipe for Ethiopian chicken stew. The one before that is actually connected to the purpose of this blog--it connects some trends in mediated communication to our very human penchant for building imaginary versions of other people. The upcoming one will be posted this Friday and will be about Christian liturgy and the idea of enactment. The one after that, which will go up 2 weeks from this coming Friday, will be about my 10 years of visiting monasteries. I've actually written a few things for them in the past as well (a couple of essays and a couple of poems).

Tyrannies Young as the Morning

2007-11-15T10:02:00.000-06:00

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebels attack a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true freethinker is he whose intellect is as free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.

--G.K Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

As I read this quote, I was thinking about the hype about each new technology as it arises--it reminded me of the "tyrannies fresh as the morning" about which Chesterton speaks so eloquently. Then again, since every new technology for the last couple hundred years has the same kind of hype attached to it, it's ironically also pretty antiquated.

The same goes, ironically, for the outright rejection of new technology and the complaints that society is going downhill because of it--those are always new, yet also, as a genre, old as the hills (and as the metaphor "old as the hills").

Technologies are by no means perfect and the panacea for all ills, as the futurist hypers tend to claim. Nor are they the root of all evils as the dystopian futurists claim. As Chesterton suggests, it makes sense that we thoughtfully disengage from both of these potential "will bes" to consider what ought to be.

Not that it would be easy to find our way in the middle ground between these two viewpoints. I suspect it would be particularly hard to restrain ourselves from the utopian side, what with all the keeping up with the latest gadget or trend that's going on in our society. But it's worth the trying.

On that note, I think I'm going to listen to some music on my perfectly-good four-year-old iPod and read a book.

Connections Between Scholarship and the Web

2007-10-15T21:36:00.000-06:00

I haven't been posting much on the "im here" blog, but that's because I've been writing academic papers about related topics instead. We had to hand in our most recent paper for our Online Interaction class via a blog, and it's pertinent here, so here's a link to it.

If you want more info before clicking, the paper is called "Footnotes and Hyperlinks: Scholarly Inheritance and the Web." It traces conventions on the Web (and other forms of computer-mediated communication) that have been inherited from academic writing. By tracing the similarities, it's possible to differentiate what's new in online communities compared with scholarly communities.

Electronic Conversations and Simultaneity

2007-10-04T18:27:00.000-06:00

So I was playing a game of Scrabble online with my friend Rilla. The game has a little messaging function where you can leave little instant-message-like notes for each other for the next time you make the move, thus enabling a new version of the kind of small-talk you would be having if you were playing the game in person. And as I was looking at a play she had just made in our current game, I giggled at the slightly off-color word she had just made. As I was still doing so, I opened the messaging window and saw that she had written her own giggle into the messaging function.

What was odd about the moment was how simultaneous it felt to me. Even though it was likely minutes, if not hours, since she had written the words (and likely had long since stopped giggling), it felt like one of those moments when as kids we used to say the same thing at the same time and then yelled "JINX!" Despite the reality of the time-lag, it felt like we were laughing together.

This moment left me wondering about the weird mix that's created between the persistence of text, the (at least potential) immediacy of electronic communications media, its conversationality, and textual media's potential for more reflectiveness than a face-to-face conversation.

I'm not sure what new thing's been created in the combination of these things, but it's definitely something fascinating. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Video: 2005 Miami U. Cheezies a cappella: Facebook Song

2007-09-29T23:06:00.001-06:00

This video is hilarious, but beyond that, it makes an interesting commentary about social interaction and the Web by its subtext of applying a '50s love song to a new social networking technology, positing through exaggerated means that it's not the people we meet on Facebook that's as important as the social gratification we gain through it.

I can see their point, and yet the implications of the interaction and communication within Facebook are much more complex than that, depending on how various people use the tool.

And then, the "stalking" ethos mentioned in the song alone is a fascinating concept--it's amazing how many people I've heard talk about how they feel they're "stalking" their friends on Facebook, when it's their friends who choose to publish their information for their friends to see. One wonders if the same person who feels they "stalk" their friends on Facebook feel that they're "stalking" a public figure/celebrity by reading their published memoirs...

(And it is a written/multimedia publication, after all, even if the Facebooker in question keeps it to a circulation of the few "friends" of the Facebooker--the same Facebooker who, after all, has a choice about whether their friends list is kept to close family and/or friends or to stretch it to a broad range of acquaintances, and whether to keep the acquaintances from a chunk of their published information.)

It would be interesting to apply some of the media systems theory I was just reading about to people's uses of Facebook, and to see whether younger people used it differently than older people. Ah, the potential research questions so easily multiply...

Language, Contextualization, and the Web

2007-09-14T08:16:00.000-06:00

So the other night, to relax after my evening communication theory class, I picked up C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words. Especially since we'd just been talking about contextualization of meaning, I was fascinated when he drew attention to the power of context to help us understand a word's meaning (p. 19-21).

The idea was that if you said "her philosophy is poor," and had no context, you might think it meant that she had a bad philosophy of life, but if it was admittance counselors for grad school looking at a transcript, they might be speaking of her grades in a philosophy class.

I've always loved this sort of thing--it's these delightful ambiguities in language that make it so delightful (while at times frustrating) to write using it.

Thinking of it in the context of the Web, though, I was fascinated by the potential ramifications of this medium for language. Specifically, it brought home to me why writing up navigation bar wording was always so frustrating for me--if you're forced to state a big concept for your web visitors into a single word or two, you're not trying to be poetic with multiple meanings, so you have to think of all the ways that word can be read and misread, because the person could have found the page from anywhere or could have been searching using an entirely different mindset.

Linguistic contexts, in other words, are to a certain extent challenged by the Web. Sure, if there's a navigation item, there's a certain amount of context from the other items and from the page, and if you're unsure of it, you always can click to find out more of the context through the destination page, but no one's going to click on everything to find out what's behind it, and without doing that, navigating the Web can be like overhearing a bunch of snippets of conversations without knowing what the speakers are talking about. That's not entirely a bad thing or an entirely new thing, but it's fascinating to think about what this new widespread application of it might be doing to language and the way we read, write, and understand it.

Except, wait--if actually relevant, links can not only add that context back in, they can add richness to the context. That richness was there in reference and academic books in the form of footnotes, citations, and bibliographies, but it's fascinating that it's been brought to another genre.

Both aspects are true, actually: words on the Web are both contextualized less and contextualized more than they are, say in an academic article. Wonder what Lewis would have thought of it.

Life, Time, and Communication Media

2007-09-08T07:37:00.000-06:00

So I've been moving this summer and then starting my new PhD program, which is primarily the reason I haven't been posting much to the "im here" blog. The other reason, I must admit, is having joined Facebook, where I've been keeping up with friends (without sacrificing seeing the friends I can see in person).

In other words, I've been spending more time on other pursuits--the ones I've mentioned and many others. Thinking about this displacement of time makes me realize a truth I somewhat grudge the existence of at times: that, in short, there's only so much time in a day.

For me, this is in part a difficult truth because I hate moving (particularly across the country) and how much time it's taken this summer from my reading and writing tasks.

But that's not the only reason. It's also a difficult truth to acknowledge because I'm loathe to admit, when it comes to media studies, that things change in our focus and attention when we start spending time on certain media. I'm one of those people that wants to have it all and make that okay.

Part of this difficulty in making an academic admission is personal. I don't want to admit that if I were to spend a lot of time watching TV, for instance, might mean that I might read or write less for awhile. Or that if I spend a lot of time communicating on the phone or hanging out with friends in person or spend my time on academic work, it keeps me from doing some of my creative writing.

These sorts of choices are especially apparent when one starts a new pattern of life in a new place. But of course, I also realize that they aren't just choices about which media to use. In part, they're also choices about who and how to spend my time communicating with, not just particular people but also among audiences: for instance, my friends and family, both far away and new ones in town; other academics through their writings and in class; or other creative people through their various creations on various media and by dialoguing with them by working my own stuff.

These decisions are of course choosing some media over others, but at their base they are primarily choices about how to balance the many activities and relationships of one's life--in this case, within a new environment while starting a new school season. The fact that we have so many media giving us so many communication options simply makes the decisions harder.

In some ways that's a bad thing, in that it threatens to overwhelm us at times. Also, choices of media aren't simply neutral choices--different media do carry with them certain biases we should keep in mind. On the other hand, it feels like a privilege to live in a world with so many options, and to be a thinking human being who is able to make choices among them.

Of course, I'm also thankful that now that I'm more settled into my new town and my new apartment, I can focus less attention on those overwhelming tasks involved in moving and settling in, which means I'll have more time again to spend on other things I'd prefer to be doing but haven't found enough time for in awhile (blogging and creative writing among them).

"Only a Problem Confronting the Builder of Bridges"

2007-08-04T00:14:00.000-06:00

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god---sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities---ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

--T. S. Eliot, ll. 1-10, "The Dry Salvages," Four Quartets

I was just re-reading Four Quartets in preparation for next week's MA thesis defense and got chills when I came across these lines again. The chills were in connection with this week's collapse of the bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The chills were more intense because Eliot, who grew up near the Mississippi River further down in St. Louis, was referring to the same river when he wrote these lines.

It reminded me of one early theory I'd heard on CNN about the collapse--that the water from rivers often works away at weakening pilings of bridges until the whole bridge threatens to collapse.

"[S]ullen, untamed, and intractable" indeed.

Whether or not that actually turns out to be the reason the bridge collapsed (and not to minimize the tragedy at all for those who went through it), the collapse is certainly a good reminder to us that however much we try to solve the "problem[s] confronting the builders of bridges," we can't reduce the mysteries and the power of the world into problems to be solved quite so easily as we tend to think in today's world, where makers of websites and search engines seek to research complex human behaviors, then to try to tell programmers how to write programs codifying them into gridded databases.

I certainly hope to always remember that life is about far more than simply solving such problems: that's one reason I decided to study Eliot's poem during my MA. To be reminded that there is more to the world than the too-often-shallow things we're so often asked to look for in it. More to us as humans than what we buy or how we're entertained or how we search for something on the Web. More to the power in words than their ability to at times boil things down for easy consumption (for one thing, there's something glorious to their proliferation and oft-inexactitude as well). More to a bridge collapsing than the snippets we hear on the news--things that last longer than the news coverage. More out there that we too often "choose to forget."

We too often approach too many parts of the world as though they were a craft, as opposed to an art--something to be easily mastered. But there's so much artistic greatness in the world as it is presented to us--both beautiful and terrible--that we too often forget.

However much we try to understand and tame our complex world, there will always be mystery about it, both in the world around us and within ourselves. In this world, which sometimes seems filled with "worshippers of the machine" seeking for ways to dispense of this mystery and this moreness, we would do well to remember this lesson.

Time Off from the World of Things I Can't Do Anything About

2007-07-12T09:50:00.000-06:00

"I'm in awe of the news junkies who can watch three screens at once and maintain their up-to-the-minute data without plunging into despair or cynicism. But I have a different sort of brain. For me, knowing does not replace doing. I find I sometimes need time off from the world of things I can't do anything about so I may be granted (as the famous prayer says) the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

--Barbara Kingsolver, "The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In" in Small Wonder

It was a few years ago now I was talking to one of my friends about the information age and the guilt (and, as Kingsolver here adds, the despair) it can so easily bring about. A world of instant communication means that it can easily feel like we should be up-t0-date on everything all the time because we can be. That up-to-date-ness can, in the wrong circumstances, become a sort of passive despair, in which we spend much of our lives hearing about other lives, many of which are sad ones we can do very little about.

A world of instant communication, as Kingsolver implies, also means that we must narrow down our attention to those things that matter most. Of course, the challenge is to keep that latter part--things that matter most--and not shift it into "things I'm most comfortable with." The danger is to narrow down only to the things and the people we like, not allowing ourselves to be challenged by serendipitous chance encounters or by the things and people that we're uncomfortable with.

The challenge, therefore, is to stay aware of the world, but to balance that awareness with action, with our own contributions and participations where we can. A key to this, I think, is to fight back against the constant input, taking back moments for reflection on the things we're absorbing. The best actions often begin with stillness--something that despite all the noise around us can be remarkably easy to take back when one gives an effort.

On the whole, as Kingsolver suggests, the serenity prayer is more important than ever in our information age. And her suggestion that knowing should not replace doing is a good reminder to me, not just as an information consumer, but also as an avid reader and an academic who spends much of my time absorbing information and stories in the worlds of books.

It's a good reminder to me to join the conversation as much as I listen in, to take time not just to ponder, but also to talk to people, to write down and polish my thoughts and then to seek to get them out there in the world. (Of course, it also reminds me that there are other, even more physical actions I can take, and that I should occasionally get out in the world and take them.)

Video: The Impotence of Proofreading By Taylor Mali

2007-06-22T18:12:00.001-06:00

Having read some results of over-dependence on computer spellcheck functions while grading English 110 papers, I found this YouTube video quite funny. The tool definitely only does what you ask it to... And it's a phenomenon that teachers wouldn't have had to deal with nearly as much 15 or 20 years ago.

Thanks to Jodie for sharing the link.

Ah, those Newfangled Typewriters!

2007-06-18T17:03:00.000-06:00

"'Have you some more typing to do tonight, Miss Murchison?'

"'Got to do the whole bally thing again,' said Miss Murchison. 'Left out a paragraph on page one--it would be page one, of course--and he wants the tripe round at Hanson's by 10 o'clock.'

"Mr. Pond groaned slightly and shook his head.

"'Those machines make you careless,' he reproved her. 'In the old days, clerks thought twice about making foolish mistakes, when it meant copying the whole document out again by hand.'

"'Glad I didn't live then,' said Miss Murchison, shortly. 'One might as well have been a galley-slave.'"

--From Dorothy Sayers' 1930 mystery novel Strong Poison

Clearly, while our technology has changed a bit in the last 70 or 80 years, the argument about whether things have gotten better or worse has stayed pretty much the same...

Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles

2007-05-30T22:55:00.001-06:00

I love this "medieval helpdesk" video (in Norwegian with English subtitles) not just because it's hilarious (though it is), but also because it's a reminder of something we often forget--that once the now-familiar conventions of the book were as new to people as IM or texting is to those today.

The book, too, is a technology, one that changed how we think in many ways. Ways that we often forget when we're considering how newer media, and how we use them, are shaping society. For instance, did the widespread use of the book after the printing press create introverts? I've been reading Walter Ong on how the book and book culture changed things--I'm sure I'll post commentary on that soon.

Copyrights and Creativity: "A Fair(y) Use Tale"

2007-05-30T14:36:00.001-06:00

This 13 minute YouTube video (which pieces together Disney cartoon clips to speak about the state of copyright today) not only raises interesting ideological questions, it also proves that didacticism and creativity can definitely go together when done well. It also proves the continuing power of editing to shape original material into something entirely new.

Thanks to Cindy for sending me the link.

A Link In Honor of the Reason I Haven't Been Posting Lately

2007-05-23T10:18:00.000-06:00

Websites help solo travelers meet like-minded locals: This article talks about ways that websites can lessen loneliness for travelers (in "G-rated" ways). A commentary on how the web interacts with "real-world" socialization...

I don't have much more to say about it than that at the moment--just wanted to post a link on traveling in honor of my last month's activities.

A Confession and an Announcement

2007-04-24T11:44:00.000-06:00

I have a confession and an announcement to make. Neither of these may be all that startling to my readers who've heard me talk about them in person, but I thought I'd share anyway.

First, the confession. One of the main reasons I created this blog is because I was thinking about doing a PhD in Communications. I wanted to record my thoughts surrounding my areas of interest so I could get a sense of the threads I was most interested in, and as a bonus, maybe start a discussion around some of them.

This confession leads to the announcement: Starting in August, I will indeed be starting a doctoral program in communication research at Purdue University in Indiana. I'll be primarily working in the area of Media, Technology, and Society, hopefully focusing on the ways we write and read in a technological age.

What this means for the blog, I'm not entirely sure yet. But I somehow think I'll have more material for it than ever.

And Back to Librivox...

2007-04-16T10:57:00.000-06:00

So as a special treat to myself for writing 18 thesis pages in two days, finishing up the first draft of my MA thesis, I went back to Librivox this weekend. I figured I'd find some audiobooks to listen to while I clean up the worst of the thesis-books mess that's been on my living room floor for the past four months or so.

I was pleasantly surprised by how many free public-domain audiobooks have been added to the stock since I last visited, along with a search function for the catalog and the ability to browse by genre. Considering it's all volunteer work, things are really coming along over there.

I picked some old favorites to transfer to my iPod: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy and Jerome K. Jerome's funny Victorian travelogue Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog). Check them out if you get a chance.

I look forward to listening to them as I rescue my apartment from its thesis-focused neglect and as I take long walks in the newly springlike weather.

Ah, the easy liberation from the indoors the iPod brings us--a chance to catch up on the classics and be active at the same time. With such ease of use, I may even get around to downloading and making it all the way through Moby Dick (which I noticed is also now up at Librivox) one of these days--perhaps during one of my long summer road trips.

There's something delightful about using new technology to spread classic stories, many of which have been around since before the phonograph and the radio.

Burying Myself in My Word Processor

2007-04-04T10:38:00.000-06:00

Okay, so some may think it may be hard to bury oneself into a laptop screen that's less than a centimeter thick, but that's what I'm seeking to do quite a bit over the next few weeks to get the rough draft of my MA thesis done. I will probably be buried in a few books from time to time as well, a process that's no less obscure and just as virtual in many ways. Words, after all, are virtual representations of thoughts, whether they're scrawled or printed in paper or appear on a computer screen.

I wonder how we came up with this metaphor, to bury oneself in something? Interesting how many of our metaphors for virtual activities are approached by way of flesh-and-blood-and-sweat ones. Not that finishing up the rough draft of a thesis is less work than actually burying something, it's just a different kind of work. Hopefully I'm burying treasure instead of something unsavory.

Okay, now I'm just procrastinating. Time to flip back to that other window and bury myself, once again, in T. S. Eliot and Thoreau.

Stretching out of Media Hibernation...

2007-03-19T11:35:00.000-06:00

Even though it's 3 degrees Fahrenheit outside, I can feel spring a-coming (and see it on the weather forecast in the guise of more above-freezing weather to complement the melty stuff we had last week). Along with this feeling, I'm beginning to literally become more active and less media-dependent, as I do each spring. And so I wished to spend a bit of time reflecting on the seasonality of my media use, because every year this pattern seems to recur in some form.

Every year once spring comes (particularly here in Saskatchewan, where it's particularly welcome) I find myself stretching my legs, abandoning the need to watch my TV shows and my insistence on movies. Even when it's cold outside I find myself becoming more active inside the house: spending less time on my computer playing Triple Yahtzee or watching DVDs. More time turning on music and dancing to it. More time thinking about all those physical projects (like sorting through papers) that I've always intended to do but somehow haven't gotten around to yet.

I even find myself making a greater effort to keep in touch with friends and family, which interestingly, with many of those far away, increases my use of communications technology.

So yeah, it really does feel like waking out of a hibernation and rejoining the world of life and activity. It's not that I wasn't joined to it in many ways throughout the winter (including going to the gym), but the motivation to do it more is back, and once again is growing with the ice puddles outside.

I find a similar pattern to be the case with my creative writing--in the spring and summer, I often spend more time collecting new writing material, whereas in the winter, I'm more likely to spend time reflecting on how that material fits into the rest. This year, I find it a bit reversed--the winter seems to have been the simmering time, and now the creativity is starting to churn again (which is quite nice). But no matter which way things go, they always shift about this time.

My question is whether in the northern climes this is an average pattern. Is it just me, or do many of our individual patterns of use of media and communications technology follow a seasonal cycle? And does it affect everyone the same, or like SAD, does it affect some more than others?

It's NEVER Been Done Before?

2007-03-09T11:31:00.000-06:00

I love listening to people talking about the web, but whenever I hear the words "this is done now on the web, and it's NEVER been done before" it sets my teeth on edge. And so when I was listening again to the speech David Weinberger, an expert on blogs, gave on the Library of Congress' excellent "Digital Future" series of talks (available to listen free here), and heard him say these words, my teeth gave an answering twitch.

Especially when I'm currently engaged to a very similar analog process to the one he was talking about.

What he was talking about was this: the web of what he calls subjective knowledge between bloggers--people responding to other bloggers, and readers learning from that knowledge. Voice in writing being important in whether people will believe the stuff or not. People pointing away from the current writing by "linking" to other writings.

I'm halfway through an academic thesis in the humanities, and I say "pshaw" to the idea that these things have never been done before. Has David Weinberger ever read through any significant body of academic writing, or tried to write a paper in response to it? What is good academic essay writing but a series of links provided in citations? What is a good research/response essay than a response directly stating an opinion (agreement/disagreement/partial agreement) about what another critic has been saying?

And anyone who's tried to read lots of critical essays is pretty aware that voice is a huge element of whether this genre is taken seriously.

This is not to say that David Weinberger's talk isn't an excellent one, worth re-listening to even 3 years (so long in web time) after it was first given. And I'm actually quite fascinated by what he has to say about forgiveness and unselfishness as being key elements of blogging. (Forgiveness because the writing isn't as polished and many readers accept that before reading, unselfishness because of the linking.) Especially because bloggers are so often accused of egotism and sloppiness.

But as to the fact that a web of semi-subjective knowledge (complete with links to other bits of knowledge it's responding to) has NEVER been done before, I say "pshaw." I'm in the midst of reading sources and creating an 80-page paper that proves that's not the case.

This connection between what happens in blogging and academic writing does give me a fascinating idea/analogy for teaching university students what academic writing's all about, however. Those raised to be web- and My Space-literate, if they're taught how to harness those skills for academic writing, could bode well for the future of academic writing. What a fascinating thought.

A Beef about the (Mis)Use of the Phrase "Attention Span"

2007-03-05T12:28:00.000-06:00

Those who talk about the deterioration of our attention spans from new technology tend to use that blanket term for many things that aren't actually attention-span-related.

For instance, I've heard people say that frequent email-checking shows that we can't focus on a single task at a time anymore and that our attention spans have become fractured and unstable.

I disagree.

For one thing, frequent checking of email shows we have an amazing attention span for keeping up with our email, and many people have so integrated it into their daily work that it really doesn't detract that much focus from other tasks, just becomes a matter of course.

Of course, there are times where an interesting email--or an urgent one--distracts from those other tasks. And there can be times when that normally-integrated task claims more attention than the other things.

That can be good or it can be bad.

I've noticed that those who complain about short attention spans of people usually have a stake in the other tasks, not in attention to the email. Those who would like to break through those other tasks using email are likely to complain that you don't check email frequently enough (or respond quickly enough) if you don't respond right away.

What really seems to be happening here is a kind of weird expectations upheaval. Because of the possibility of "instant" communication, it becomes more and more necessary for people to communicate what "ASAP" means (and what's possible), and manage the sort of anxiety that used to be present only at mailtime when one was expecting a particularly interesting or important letter. Whether you view that focus favorably or negatively depends on whether you would call focus to a single task over others great passion and attention or whether you would call it obsession.

This kind of anxiety isn't something that didn't happen in the past--there were many times people were worried about a single topic to the point where they at times ignored other things, and the question of what people prioritize certainly isn't a new one. But the technology today--and its attendant upheaval in expectations--seems to be exacerbating both the possibility of such passions, and the negative view of them by those whose tasks aren't part of them.

I find it particularly fascinating that these passions/obsessions continue in this new technology--a new technology that gets credited so often with shortening our attention spans.

Another related fascination I have is that our Western society is so used to the concept of multi-tasking by now that when a person chooses to uni-task a bit more, they find that difficult to deal with (sometimes rightly, sometimes not), even though I would argue that new media encourage that sort of passion/obsession (think of online poker players, for instance) almost as much as it encourages the culture of multi-tasking.

Being Witnessed

2007-02-21T21:06:00.000-06:00

Since Lent starts again today, I've been thinking and talking about Lenten disciplines again recently. That has included talking about my Lenten experiment from last year, in which I gave up playing solitaire (on my computer) and Bejewelled (on my cell phone)--both games that I used to procrastinate from my graduate school homework. If you've forgotten, not playing these games resulted, in part, in my spending more of my procrastination time hanging out with people in person, and I felt more guilty about procrastinating in that way (for some reason) than I did playing games.

Anyway, I was talking to a new friend about this, and she used just the right word to describe why I felt guilty: it was because my procrastination was witnessed.

The more I've thought about this word, the more appropriate it seems to describe an effect the technological revolution has had on society. For years we've been aware that new technology, especially the Internet, has been amazing for introverts--one can look, read, and participate anonymously, without feeling like someone is watching you. It fosters a sense that you're not being witnessed--even though with our awareness of cookies and other techniques, we know that in another sense we are being watched. But it's hard to feel as though we are.

And this sense extends to our online and electronic communications. IM, email, blogging, even talking on cell phones in restaurants or listening to iPods--it's easy to forget that others can be watching (or listening) in. Even some people who are introverts in the non-technological world find it easy to lower their self-censor when communicating through (or around) some of these new media.

As Gerry McGovern noted last week, sometimes that's a bad thing. But sometimes it's also a good thing, especially for those who have good things to say but have felt excessively shy about it before. All in all, it's a fascinating idea--one I'd like to explore more in-depth. How have people who would have felt witnessed (and self-conscious about it) in the world of twenty years ago been affected in their actions both on- and offline by this phenomenon? How has our culture changed as a result of this? I wonder...

And I wonder what those people who didn't like being witnessed were like before the printing press allowed for reading to become a general thing.

Some More Thoughts on Blogs

2007-02-11T23:16:00.000-06:00

Don't Let Your Blog Come Back to Haunt You: In this article, Gerry McGovern provides an apt reminder that it's easy to get too comfortable in the informal atmosphere of the web, particularly when it comes to blogging. In the process he illuminates some common-sense--but also often overlooked--differences between the communities formed on blogs and other kinds of conversations.

That said, if you remember that problem I talked about last month with history and losing our records, blogging is possibly an antidote to some of that. That is, as McGovern points out, blogs are records--and although they take certain technology to read, because they're more public, there's a better chance that historians of the future will be able to read them than that they'll have access to our email records or our documents stored on our hard drives.

So although I would agree with Gerry McGovern's word of caution, as a person interested in historical writings and informal drafts indicating thoughts, I say: Blog on, bloggers. Think about first what you'd like to say to posterity, perhaps, as Thoreau may well have done when he wrote his journal (check out how Greg Perry re-packaged it as a daily blog). But blog on.

Are Books Losing Out or Not?

2007-02-02T11:28:00.000-06:00

Are books doomed to ultimate extinction or are they still going strong? Two recent articles I've found highlight different sides of the ongoing debate:

Lament from a Librarian: Books are a Hard Sell: In this article, a high school librarian bemoans two things: (1) the change of focus for librarians (from book-centric to all-media-centric, from educating readers about critical thinking and content to education about how to sort through information); and (2) the increasing challenge of getting high-school level readers to be interested in reading literature that's helpful for training their minds, but more difficult to read.

Obama's books drive talk of '08 presidential run: This article highlights the idea that publishing recent, popular books has helped Barack Obama in his potential bid for the American presidency, and that sales numbers of the books by candidates might be one way to view which nominee might win the party nominations. The idea underlying this article is that books and their contents definitely have an influence on public opinion.

My thoughts: I'll try not to blather on too much about my opinion (I have a sense this post could go on forever), but my sense is that, although both sides have a point, I agree more with the points made by the latter article. We're quick these days to bemoan the passing of books, but yet sales of books continue strong, reading groups are a big trend across North America, and, as Pulitzer-Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson pointed out her talk at the Festival of Faith and Writing last spring, attendances at readings and lectures are up around the country.

It's true that we should watch carefully the effects of the information age on us: we should work hard to seek depth over breadth in a world that seeks to manage the overload by seeking to reduce things to soundbites. We should push against this pressure to do lots of things quickly, but none of them well. We should be aware of this tendency that's growing within ourselves and our culture to desire to have everything presented to us in a way that appeals to us. And we should be teaching the next generation about these trends.

But it encourages me that people are seeking to read the books of presidential nominees. It shows that many people aren't happy with the soundbites they get in the nauseating TV ads and other less-than-satisfactory ways of judging what the candidate actually thinks on a topic. They're seeking more depth, more transparency, and they're willing to put in the hours needed to discriminate among the candidates. And that gives me hope for the political process as well as for the culture of literacy as a whole. That hope may not continue until the next presidential election, but for now it's encouraging.

On a related note, I'll confess that I'm nearly as excited as everyone else that the new Harry Potter book is coming out this July, and just as nervous about what will happen to the characters in this last book in the series--a series that may not be high literature, but is fascinating, not least because it's effectively persuaded non-readers to make their way through thousands of pages to finish the saga...

(Thanks to Cindy for sending me the first link.)

It Was Only a Matter of Time...

2007-01-25T18:43:00.000-06:00

Text message novel published in Finland: Well, since emails have long since become stock parts of now-being-published novels, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of doing this. Of course, it would only work in a country where text messaging was mainstream enough for a large audience to be able to decipher all the abbreviations. If the Finnish prime minister broke up with his girlfriend through a text message, then the time is probably ripe for this publication in that country, at least.

Technology's Effects on Historical Studies

2007-01-20T16:56:00.000-06:00

The Lost Art of the Letter: Although this article raises it in a science history context, the author raises a point that academics involved in all areas of historical study will have to face at some point.

Electronic formatting and communication make things more capturable (in the sense that IM conversations, for instance, can be so easily saved). But as I've mentioned before on this blog, they also make them more fragile, in the sense that hard drives crash and people regularly delete and overwrite electronic drafts of things they're working on--or letters they've written.

This article raises the difficulties for science historians this process creates, and the same is true, if not magnified, in other historical disciplines such as literary studies, where drafts of work as well as correspondence are often key to disentangling the "authoritative edition" of a literary work.

As the author notes, the quickness of electronic media is a boon for collaboration, for quick capture of creative ideas, and for an author/scientist keeping track of the latest edition of a work. But with the author I hesitate to fully embrace this medium without thinking about the potential limitations electronic media places on future historians' processes and potential discoveries.

There have always been large gaps in the historical record, but the move to largely electronic storage for documents--and our corresponding shift to a more casual approach to destroying them--is something more people interested in history (of all types) should be concerned about. It's a problem librarians have been working on for years, but it's a big enough problem that they shouldn't have to shoulder the burden alone.

Update on the GRE and The Postal Service

2007-01-11T10:47:00.000-06:00

For those of you curious about my throes with the GRE and the postal service (see my earlier post), I came back from Christmas to find an envelope with scores in it from the GRE. Alas, however, the scores were from the computer-based General Test I took on December 12, not the paper-based Subject Test in Literature I took on November 4. Apparently technologically-based exams have an "in" with the Canadian-American postal systems or something.

Ah, well, according to the helpful admissions websites that tell me the state of my supplementary applications materials, the programs themselves seem to be receiving my scores. And as my reasonable friends remind me, it's more important that they know my scores than that I do. And that's true. So I'll wait--I'm sure the postal service will deliver the scores sooner or later.

In my more enlightened moments, I tell myself that in this instant age, it's actually a good discipline to have to wait for this. It's hard to remember at times, but fast communication is a privilege, not a right.

Stuck at Home, but not Disconnected

2007-01-11T10:30:00.000-06:00

On weeks like this one, in which I've been stuck at home with Influenza A (the bad kind which I'm not supposed to share around), I've been intensely thankful for communications technology. The phone, particularly. Also email. IM. I've been going a bit crazy as it is, without face-to-face social contact, but it would be worse without the possibility of talking to people I like who help me from getting too far into my head. Solitude is good, but only for so long.

The whole thing, particularly since we had a big old prairie blizzard on top of it all, has made me think of those Little House on the Prairie sketches of pioneers, in which they were housebound and isolated from each other and those back home.

This week I can imagine the loneliness they felt, and I'm thankful that I don't have to go into that level of cabin fever (defined, incidentally, by the Alaska Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide as "a twelve-foot stare in a ten-foot room"). And it makes me think that for all the craziness that is brought on by our world of instant communication, I'm rather glad for the connectedness it allows for, particularly on weeks like this.

So thanks to all those who have been in touch. It's helped. I'll be mostly sequestered for a few more days yet, so keep it coming.

In Withdrawal...

2006-12-26T16:40:00.000-06:00

I've been on traveling for almost two weeks now, and a good portion of that time I haven't had Internet access available to me on the 24-7 basis I'm accustomed to. I knew I was used to using it, but I never realized quite how many of my daily and monthly errands required extensive use of the Internet. I pay bills online. I've been finishing up grad applications, and many of those have online components which take a lot of time to fill out.

On the more communications-connected front, I've missed having email and IM as an alternative to the phone for contacting some friends. Not to mention the blog-reading I'm behind on.

I suppose it's not that surprising--and even a bit healthy--that I'm a bit out of touch while on vacation visiting others. And realistically, it hasn't been terribly hard to get to places with wireless for a few minutes now and then. But it's certain that I've learned to appreciate once again my full-time Internet at home.

And on the creativity front, I find it interesting how hard it is to do, not the writing itself, but the pitching and printing of the writing without easy access to the usual tools--the Internet and a printer. It's one thing to compose without these things, but it's hard to research markets and send stuff out without them.

Now that I've had a few days with Internet, I'll be back to another week of spotty access before I get back to my standard way of life. And it seems that the potential portability of our errands nowadays, while nice, has a few potential downsides to it. But that's okay--most of my key online errands have been completed now, so all will be well.

It's been nice to get away a bit, but it's usually also nice to get back by the end. That great truth of traveling hasn't changed much with the advent of technology. It just has a technology-related twist to it at times now.

Observation Doesn't Quite Fit Either Hype...

2006-12-26T15:41:00.000-06:00

So a few weeks ago I was walking from security to my gate in the Richmond, Virginia airport. As I did, I thought about how different the communication patterns in airports are now from ten years ago. Many more people talking on cell phones. Many more people (I was one of them) listening to iPods. People with laptops.

A critic of technology, I realized, might point out those things in the airport and say they were overly-virtualizing communication. That they were keeping from talking to each other face-to-face. Living in virtual worlds instead of the real world.

But then again, there were still lots of people reading books. Talking to people they were traveling with. But my favorite sight--one that made me smile--was two people who didn't look like they knew each other, yet were talking to each other. Why? It seemed--from a glance, at least--that the reason they had connected was because of the electrical outlets their laptops were plugged into.

It's true that communications media has changed the world to a certain degree. And it's probably unhealthily virtualized some of our relationships. But it's delightful to think that it's unexpectedly also forged face-to-face conversations between strangers.

The GRE, the Postal Service, and Internet Study Guides

2006-11-25T10:57:00.000-06:00

So I came home the other day and there in my real live mailbox (not the virtual one) there was an envelope from ETS, the organization that manages the GREs. Now, seeing as how I didn't need to take the GRE to get into this MA program, I just took the GRE Subject Test in Literature on November 4. So when I saw the return address, I thought, "Wow! I thought the scores were supposed to take four to six weeks! That's really quick!" (I really was thinking in exclamation points.)

But then--alas--I looked down further on the envelope, and saw the label, which included the words "Practice Test." And I harrumphed. (I'm not sure when the last time is that I actually harrumphed, but I did. Honest.) You see, this was neither my scores nor my practice test for my upcoming General Test--the packaging made it clear that it was the practice test that was supposed to arrive before I took the Subject Test on November 4.

So I'm now expecting my Subject Test scores to arrive by mail sometime after I hear back from most of the programs I'm applying to. The expectations have officially been lowered. Silly paper-based tests. Silly Canadian-American postal service seeming-lack-of-cooperation.

Of course, other than it being a predictor of future mailings, getting the practice tests late wasn't actually that big a deal, thanks to the Internet. I had downloaded and printed a practice test months ago (not that I actually looked at it until a week before). And I found all sorts of helpful study guides online (especially Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena). And I raided the Cole's Notes- and Cliff's Notes-like sites for lots of superficial information about a lot of authors and works (I find it ironic that all those sites I've been warning undergraduates away from for the last two years were perfect helps for studying for this test). And I had a book to study from (I looked at that all of two weeks before the test).

So getting the practice test two and a half weeks after the actual test date wasn't a big deal, thanks, in large part, to the Internet. It may not be a "wonder of the world," but it is quite handy at times. Otherwise, I would have been quite annoyed at ETS and/or the postal service.

The Internet: A Wonder of the World?

2006-11-15T10:09:00.000-06:00

The Web Redefines Reality: I don't know what it is--I'm a big fan of the Web--but whenever I read an article like this one, which proclaims the Internet as one of the wonders of the world, I find myself getting skeptical. It's not that I don't think the Internet hasn't changed our society, our culture, and our sense of the world.

But I suppose I've been behind the scenes too long to be amazed at "the man behind the curtain." Take part in the creation, usability testing, and maintenance of enough websites, it's hard to be in awe of "hyperlinks, routers and fiber-optic cables" that are in constant need of updating and may crash at any time.

And as an academic, it's hard to read a phrase like "It has taken giant steps toward accomplishing one of the goals of the ancients: gathering all the knowledge in the world in one place" without thinking about the huge amount of critical thinking that must be done to discriminate which parts of it are trustworthy.

Yes, the Internet is changing our lives in profound ways. But for one thing, only some of these ways are good. And for another, some of the changes are only faux-changes. Sure the Internet might show us "the interconnectivity of things," but people have been connecting things for a long time. Perhaps, looking at history, I'm not convinced that "the enlightenment of the modern world" will stand up to the test of time. And there are down sides to too much explicit "interconnectivity of things" as well: Information overload. The possibility of increased dependence on connections being made for us instead of finding them for ourselves.

So yeah, I see the point: the Internet is pretty cool. But all earthbound "wonders" have their limitations. As does the rhetoric praising the things deemed to be wonders.

"What Is the Technology For?"

2006-11-08T01:46:00.000-06:00

"Researchers have...found that a distraction such as your cell phone ringing, has a greater impact on your concentration than smoking some marijuana.

"'Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them,' philosopher North Whitehead noted in 1911. Technology should automate the mundane--the trivial truths--so that we have more time to think about great truths.

"If technology is not making our lives more convenient, and giving us more time to think, then we need to question: What is the technology for?

--Gerry McGovern, "Managing in a Technology-Driven World"

Thought this quote was an interesting one, though my thoughts aren't wholly developed about it.

I'm not sure what I think about the statement about cell phones and marijuana... After all, cell phones can build community, and I'm not sure the idea of an attention span should be utterly sancrosanct--it is often some of the "distractions" from what we think of as our "real work" that enrich and deepen our lives the most, even if they make it difficult to concentrate at times.

Then again, there are limits to the stretching of our attention spans, and McGovern makes a good point about taking time to think about what we're using the technology for. I've often thought that our society has made an awful waste of the time we save by technology--all we've done is crammed more productivity into that extra time instead of using it to do things better (and also to do better things) during that time.

Technological Effects on Thinking: Then and Now

2006-10-30T09:56:00.000-06:00

In pages 16-18 of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book God: A Biography, literary critic Jack Miles contends that Christians thought of their biblical canon differently because they used a different (at the time newer) technological form: the codex, or bound book, instead of the scroll.

He claims that Christians were more likely to think of their biblical canon, as they compiled it, as being small chapters of a larger work because of the package they were using to put it into, while the Jews, still using individual scrolls, were more likely to think of, say, "Genesis," as an individual book as well as part of the overall Scriptural canon. The difference, he thinks, is the technological container--one which the Hebrews moved to later, but stayed away from for longer.

This contention is a fascinating one. Because of its implications for the Hebrew and Christian understandings of books and Books. And because of its implications for the thoughts it spurs about how new written media "containers" newly available to us--e.g., the Internet, the word processing program, instant messaging, email, etc.--may be changing our thinking about how to put together written works today. My thoughts on the present-day changes are as yet amorphous, but it's a fascinating comparison.

By the way, this book (God: A Biography) looks like a fascinating one so far: it looks at the character of God in the Hebrew Bible from, not a theological or historical perspective, but from a literary "close reading" perspective. Miles studies God as a complicated character in a literary work who many, many people in the Western world have sought to emulate over the last couple thousand years.

Effects of Technology on the Novel

2006-10-18T12:13:00.000-06:00

The Novel, 2.0: This fascinating article in Slate has so many interesting facets that it's hard to know what to respond to. I agree with the authors that technology is bound to change the face of the novel, but I'm not entirely sure how. Seeing as how bound book sales keep going up and up, though, I disagree that the novel is moving online any time soon (I've said since the advent of ebooks that until there's a really good reader with a readable screen, I doubt that online books will take off for anything but research and reference purposes--and even once that happens, there will always be adherents to paper).

I do agree that the web and other technology is changing both the way we do things and our attention spans, and I think that will affect some novel-writing and novel-reading (for instance, I think that the current popularity of mystery narratives comes in part out of our fascination with the detective-like quality to finding facts online). But on the whole, I think that people still long for the continuity and resolution provided by a narrative structure in an increasingly fragmented and information-overloaded world, so I don't see the traditionally-plotted novel as going away for quite some time.

As an editor of an online literary journal which encourages creative submissions that use the possibilities inherent in the online form--and having myself written a short online novel at one point (nothing could induce me to tell you the pseudonym under which I wrote it)--the most intriguing part of the article to me is the opportunities offered by the online form, as listed on page 5 of the article. I certainly experienced the workshop-like quality he mentions while I was writing my serialized story, and the impressionistic linking he suggests fascinates me as a creative concept. From now on, I'm determined to use such types of linking every so often in this blog, if only to stimulate my sense of creativity and wordplay.

Two Views on the Value of Web Publishing

2006-10-11T10:38:00.000-06:00

I find it fascinating that both of these articles have crossed the threshold of my inbox (if, indeed, an inbox can be said to have a threshold) in the last week, because they represent two very different views of the value of and possible reasons for web publishing.

Web journals threaten peer-review system: In this USAToday article, the academic debate about web publishing--in which there is mostly a negative view of the web--is showcased. The concern here seems to be that research be rigorously vetted before it goes public so that people don't act on faulty information.

Get published to get ahead: In Gerry McGovern's latest article on web content he advocates using the web, which he says is "becoming the global memory," to publish your ideas on things, to raise your status. Interestingly enough, he uses the academic "publish-or-perish" idea as a backbone to encourage the broader public to publish their ideas on the web to become known there--clearly a more positive view of web publishing than exists in many parts of academia.

Clearly Gerry McGovern (who is a highly-regarded voice on web content) is encouraging a different type of--and reason for--web publication than those who disagree with the lack of peer review on online academic journals. And I'm not sure where I fall on the debate--I suppose I agree with elements of both sides.

The crux of the question seems to be about trust in the quality of content based on editorial process or lack thereof. And it's fair to say that editorial processes which use experts to filter out shoddy work are still important in today's society--in some ways more important than ever in a world where information overload is so often king. And it's also true that people also do a fair bit of their own filtering of content, whatever they read--the information-literate web visitor today is also fairly used to sorting out whether they trust something themselves, to a certain degree.

And that's more okay with some content than it is with others. More important for some web-publishing venues than others. An email or an IM conversation is different from a blog, which is different from an e-zine, which is different from an online academic journal. As there are is in speech and in print, electronic publishing has many different levels and audiences with unique requirements. And those different levels and audiences often require different levels and kinds of editorial process.

The thing is that this debate has been around, in a slightly different form, since the printing press, if not before. It's definitely not just a web thing, this concern about quality and editorial process. But because it's applied to a relatively-new medium, it seems new. In some ways it is, but in others, it's the same. Having fairly recently come from Gerry McGovern's world into the world of academia, I'm fascinated by it, and look forward to seeing where this print-world debate will go next now that it's being applied to a medium with slightly different possibilities and limitations.

(Naturally, this thoughts-in-process reflection article has only been self-edited before publication on this blog. Please feel free to filter its contents--and the contents of this whole blog--for quality yourself.)

The Capturability and Fragility of Today's Conversations

2006-10-08T23:35:00.000-06:00

A bit over a year ago, Brenda and I lived across the street from each other. We would go for long walks a lot. And when we went for walks, Brenda was often gracious enough to brainstorm plots and characters for my stories with me.

Now that we live on different continents, we can't go for walks quite as well. Instead we chat on IM a lot. I miss the walks, but at least we can still stay somewhat caught up this way. So today we were chatting and she was gracious enough to brainstorm about the characters of my latest story with me. And I must say that however much I miss the walks and the face-to-face time, it was rather delightful to still get to do that. And it was also delightful to discover how easy it was to highlight the character-related bits of the conversation, copy them, and paste them into my notes for the developing story.

The point of this slightly rambling story is that it's becoming easier and easier for us nowadays to record, reread, reuse, and share info than it ever used to be. And I think this is part of some sort of fundamental shift in our society (though it started around the time people started chiseling things down, it's gotten exponentially faster, easier, more portable, and a greater part of our behavior lately, which is definitely changing things, though I'm not yet sure exactly how). At times (as in the case of my conversation with Brenda), it's quite helpful for creative work as well as other endeavors.

Then again, if you read this article from last week's USA Today (Instant-messaging conversations can easily linger for years...), you'll see that the recordability that was so handy for me today isn't always so nice for senators and others who so easily forget this aspect of today's written media... I was wondering when the courts would catch on to this.

Of course, it's also true that, as the article points out, writing that is easily captured is also quite mutable. And as the article doesn't point out, it is often quite fragile: dependent on quirky hard drives, web servers, etc. for its continued existence. Not to mention the whims of humans who change and/or overwrite their content, both on purpose and accidentally, on an ongoing basis. Which means the capturability only goes so far and we as humans, as well as our innovations, still have quite a few limitations.

That said, I'm pretty darn excited about the character notes.

Free Audiobooks, Here I Come

2006-10-04T01:12:00.000-06:00

Librivox.org: So I just found this website, and I'm already planning to be addicted. As a graduate student in English, I spend a lot of time staring at pages, so it's nice to have a break from that occasionally. And my auditory learning ability has increased tremendously over the last year (God bless a graduate school education).

So I'm very excited to see this site. Not only does it mean I can listen to a very nice recording of one of my thesis texts, Walden, on my iPod for free, it also means that someone out there came up with a marvelous idea: having people volunteer to read aloud public-domain literature and upload it so that anyone with Internet access can listen. Among other things, there's a nice collection of children's literature, some of which are hard to find in print or at the library anymore (like some of the Oz tales beyond The Wonderful Wizard of Oz).

So yeah, check it out and spread it around. Volunteer if you can. It sounds like fun.

"Not Technological But Social and Cultural"

2006-10-03T08:26:00.000-06:00

"The deep and enduring changes of our age are not technological but social and cultural. They are thus harder to see, for they result from the gradual accumulation of small, incremental changes in our day-to-day lives. These changes have been building for decades and are only now coming to the fore."

--Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class

Now since I read this on a "Quote of the Day" email, I'm not entirely sure what Richard Florida went on to say, but I find this quote fascinating and at least partially true. People get so sidetracked by the seeming-newness and the promise of newness that comes with technology at times, to the point where they often either claim it as a savior or blame it for everything. But when you look back in history and story, people are much the same today as they were years and years ago. They might interact a bit differently with each other and with technology--and that's fascinating. But then, so are the continuances.

Take the virtual Chia Pet for an example (see last week's post). I've always been bad at plants, so it makes sense I'd be bad at them online as well.

Or the gym (my most recent post). To be honest, I've always had a bit of trouble getting motivated to exercise when I've been slacking off at it, which is at least part of why I've had trouble staying focused in the gym. Then again, it's easier when I'm chatting with a friend while I exercise, which is hard to do in the gym environment with carefully-spaced treadmills and TVs. Or thinking, which is also difficult. Or listening to my podcasts, which must be blared over the music. So yesterday when I recognized the machines were full I zipped upstairs to the nearly-empty walking/jogging track and had a delightful long walk. And it was still inside, but it was better.

I have no idea what this says about the "deep and enduring changes of our age," but it certainly says that my motivations and difficulties of staying motivated are similar no matter the technology. But it doesn't necessarily follow that culture and society won't gradually be changed, one way or another, by a bunch of people like me enacting these motivations through a variety of kinds of technological or non-technological environments.

That change is hard to see while it's happening, but it's fun to try to capture all the same.

Thoughts from the Gym

2006-09-27T20:11:00.000-06:00

So I was at the gym tonight, watching silent close-captioned TV (which definitely changes the experience--you forget how much of TV is auditory till you start going to the gym regularly). I was also listening to the slightly-dull piped-in techno music, but I was missing my iPod, which I'd left at home.

So as I was pounding away at the elliptical machine and the treadmill, trying to keep myself diverted (it's always harder to think the sort of deep thoughts on a treadmill that you would think outside on a walk), I wondered: if your caloric usage is supposed to be lower than your normal levels when you're watching TV, and you're trying to burn as many calories as possible at the gym, is it counter-productive for them to have TVs at the gym? Or is the lower-than-normal thing only true if you're sitting in front of the TV without doing anything else?

Or is it only true if the audio is on?

Furthermore, does it say more about my need to be entertained or more about the gym environment that I need three different "entertainment" sources at once to keep myself working out for a full hour?

Can't Even Keep a Virtual Plant Alive

2006-09-24T23:21:00.000-06:00

I've known for years that I've had a black thumb. The one time I managed to keep a plant alive for six months, I used that victory as proof that it was okay to get a couple of pets. Well, thankfully the pets are still alive (mostly because they play a much more active role in making sure I know it when they're low on food or water), because the plant died shortly after I got the pets.

But today I descended to a new low: I killed a virtual plant I'd been tending.

To be exact, it was a virtual Chia Pet on my Mac Dashboard.

I'm still not quite sure what happened. All I had to do was give it two virtual drops of water every day or two. I'd been doing so well. It was thriving.

But today I opened up my Dashboard, and there it was. On its back with X's through its little faux(virtual)-ceramic eyes.

Of course, I quickly pressed a button and--presto!--it disappeared, to be replaced with a fresh new virtual Chia Pet instantly. No time allowed for guilt in the virtual world. No need to clean up the dried-up plant detritus. No one around to witness my negligence. Things carry less weight in the virtual world; it's easy to think there are fewer consequences. In some ways, there are. Because things evolve so quickly, it's easy to give anything that occurs in a virtual space less weight than anything that occurs in the real world. It takes an extra effort to give things the significance they sometime deserve.

Not that the death of my free virtual Chia Pet is one of those things that deserves significance. But on the other hand, I feel like I've descended to a new low. It seems like I can't even keep a virtual plant alive.

Which proves, I suppose, that there's some continuity between the physical and virtual parts of my life. There are many people who would see that as healthy. But it's still sort of sad that my virtual Chia Pet died. A virtual moment of silence, please.

[insert moment here]

Okay, that's enough. It's just a plant. One made out of pixels at that. And it was free. Of course, it did look like a turtle...

These Days, It Costs to Fail...

2006-09-14T11:32:00.000-06:00

At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?: In this New York Times article, the reporter did a little investigative journalism to show that the web has only made it easier for cheating students to fail. If they don't choose the incredibly-easily-available (and therefore incredibly-easily-detectable-by-professors) free term paper sites, they have the choice for "pay for an original paper" sites. But according to this article, a random sampling of these sites produced papers that would get low or failing grades. Apparently the people who run these sites aren't rocket scientists--or maybe they are, and don't know anything about Hamlet or the fall of the Roman empire. They certainly seem to be good economists--the sites wouldn't be around in such plenty if they didn't get plenty of business. *Sigh* Technology may change, but the ugly side of human nature doesn't.

In Memoriam: 9/11

2006-09-11T00:38:00.000-06:00

Tonight, as I was watching some of the ubiquitous 5th-anniversary-of-9/11 coverage on TV, I was pulled back, as so many Americans (and so many others) likely were, to the emotions I felt while watching the much, much more ubiquitous coverage that was taking place nearly five years ago about this tragedy. Much could be said about whether the coverage birthed and/or egged on the grieving process for the U.S., how much technology took part in that role, and whether that was healthy, but I don't really want to talk about that. I'd much rather say that I'm glad they took the time to interview some prominent poets at the time, who said that, among other things, art would help us to heal. And I'm glad that technology helped us to hear that message with the others.

It certainly helped some of us. I, of course, like so many others, wrote a (very healing, at least for me) poem about the event, and I thought it would be an appropriate memorial of the 5th anniversary to share it here:

“Seven of ten adults aren’t sleeping”

Who can sleep? with the questions
sighing above our heads and no words
to describe them much less the answers.

Oh, there have been words, borrowed words
grasping words, but we the people
are beyond finding appropriate words,

definitive words. The events (such the
wrong word, makes them sound like a
football game or concert) are so

inappropriate (and that’s the wrong
word, like some naughty kid swore
in church), so discomforting (wrong

too, as though we sat collectively on
a hard sofa), so terribly unreal and
already fading before we can catch

our breaths, before they’re counted,
before the others are done lifting the sickening
tons of human ash mixed with mighty steel

fallen. Who can sleep?

--Deborah Leiter, 9/24/2001

A Connection Between E-communication and Creativity

2006-09-07T01:18:00.000-06:00

"The drive to write, that primal glee we felt as children when we learned the letters that formed our name and then the words that formed our world, is a drive that has been buried in our frantic, electrical, telephonic age.

"'E-mail' is a rebalancing of the wheel. People love e-mail because they love to write. Furthermore, because it is instantaneous, e-mail tricks people into evading their censor. E-mail isn't 'real' writing. It's something more casual and quirky and inventive. It's somehow naughty and anarchistic, like passing notes in school. E-mail tempts us into writing because it's a nonauthoritarian place to write. We can dash off quick notes, break thoughts in the middle, say, 'I'll get back to you later.' E-mail allows us intimacy without formality. No wonder we love it. It lets us drop the rock."

--Julia Cameron, The Right to Write (1998), on the stimulation of creativity through electronic communication (34)

Judging from this quote, I have a feeling Julia Cameron is gleeful over blogging and instant messaging now that both have taken off so thoroughly. And although their frequent use in business has meant these media are beginning to evolve their own levels of formality and informality in the same way that conversations and speeches have such levels, it's true that in general the instantaneous nature of these media often mean that we write much more, and much more creatively, than we ever thought we could.

I know I've had many a case of writer's block solved by writing out an idea in an email to a friend. And I know perfectly well that the times in my life I didn't think I kept a journal could be well documented by the email conversations I exchanged with my friends during those months. It's funny, because I've heard many people say the level of literacy in North America is going down because of the use of such media. Although I don't deny that the sort of writing often produced through such forms is a different kind of writing than what's been done before, I maintain that the written word has become more important than ever. But because it's easy to write and often more informal and easily deletable (not to mention a bit unstable--think of hard drives), it doesn't count in our minds.

Of course, the sort of writing that "evades the censor" isn't always the best final-draft material, which has gotten quite a few people in trouble during the last few years, as e-communication has gained a certain amount of ascendancy in our culture. But Julia Cameron's certainly right when she claims that it helps to start brainstorming in writing, to overcome writer's block and to stimulate our creative use of language. Furthermore, instantaneous communication also means instaneous response, which allows us to more easily hone our communication abilities during the early-draft stages of writing than ever before. If practice in writing makes perfect, our culture (you would think) would be well on its way.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we necessarily have as much practice at really polishing things before we send them off on their merry, instantaneous way--which is probably the situation to which those decrying the literacy levels are referring. I definitely agree that the fact that we as the members of our society are feeling too rushed to polish our writing is a definite loss. As with most things, there are both up sides and down sides to this e-communication revolution. The question, of course, is: which situation is better? I'm not sure that question is ultimately answerable except on a case-by-case basis, but it certainly is an interesting one...

"Eavesdropping" on the Web

2006-09-02T11:15:00.000-06:00

I know, I know--it's become a cliche to comment on the richness of information available on the Internet. Nonetheless, a new usage for the Web--this huge, widely inconsistent but fascinating source of communication, information, entertainment, and so much more--occurred to me today, and I'm so glad it did.

To explain, I should go back a few years, to the time when I started researching my first novel (which I'm now trying to get published). I didn't live in the place where my characters lived, so I took a lot of trips to the locale to gather information and research. Sure, you can find out a lot of stuff at the library and online, but nothing replaces experiencing the place, meeting the people, and doing a bit of stealth research by way of observing closely (and occasionally overhearing conversations) at local hangouts. As any writer will tell you, understanding dialogue and culture are key to writing well... And reading too many written personal accounts, real or fictional--newspapers seem okay, but not those that go through an editorial process before being published in a book--feels like cheating to me. I don't want to be unduly influenced by other writings.

So to zip back up to the present day, that novel manuscript is done (if that's possible, particularly before it's been through the long editorial process it's bound to undergo if it gets accepted and eventually published) and is working hard being regularly flung out out of the nest into the big, occasionally cold world of editors and agents for review. Enter new, baby novel being brainstormed, planned, researched, and generally gestating in the womb.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the places I need to visit to do experiential research for this new novel aren't as far away as the first one, so I've been able to spend a few hours and days here and there trying to understand the sorts of milieus my characters would live in and come from, what their mindsets would be, the sights, sounds, and smells they would experience, etc. Nothing can replace experiential research--there are things I'd never be able to understand without it. It's invaluable.

However, I've always felt a little uncomfortable about some of the sneakier parts of research, and particularly with the subject of this novel and my upcoming schedule, I may only have limited opportunities to do it anyway for this project. Plus, I know how uncomfortable people are with being possible subjects to be "studied" for a novel, and I never want people to feel they've been exploited as subjects (even though the actual fictional outputs end up quite different from my original material). But I need an opportunity to make sure my characters are real and well-rounded and believable. So I'm glad to have thought of a way to "eavesdrop" on the stories, attitudes, and culture of the sorts of people my characters would be around that wasn't available until the recent boom in--you guessed it--blogging.

That's right--all those personal blogs out there are a mine for someone interested in character study. They're usually not as refined as something that would be published in print, and that rawness, that spontaneousness, is perfect for my purposes. I'm particularly fond of the kind of blogs that are written under a pseudonym, since they seem to often be better material. After a couple of short Google searches, I found some lovely ones today that will suit my purposes admirably. I'm very excited to start keeping up with them--it will complement my in-person research excellently.

Thank you, creators of the Internet.

And thank you, bloggers. I appreciate it. Don't worry--if bits of people like you end up in my novel, you'll never recognize it. Besides, as an author I have a code: I never write a story until I can empathize with all of the types of people who appear in it. Thank you for the opportunity to help me with empathizing with you and others like you so I can (hopefully) introduce others to that world in a slightly different way than you've let me into yours. As a fiction writer, it's my job.

(Deborah Wipes the Virtual Sweat from Her iBook Screen)

2006-08-26T14:32:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm definitely relieved to find out that the battery for my iBook is one of the ones that was made by a non-Sony manufacturer--which means no laptop fire anytime soon. While I believed the whole "struck by lightning" odds thing reported in USAToday, I'm rather glad I'm not even likely to have my computer spontaneously combust (though, come to think of it, such a situation is great grist for a story).

It all goes to show how dependent I've become on my little white computer. I could say that this Apple recall just came at the wrong time, what with the grad school year starting up again soon and becoming this year's managing editor of The Fieldstone Review and trying to pitch my novel and starting to work on a new novel idea. That would seem like a great excuse--many needs for my computer. But the truth is that there would be no particularly good time for even a small disruption of my iBook-related life. There's always something, and although I have access to other computers, I would be in withdrawal.

The interesting part is that I was never this attached to my computer when it was a desktop. Nor, for that matter, when I was working full-time before I became a grad student... Hm...

I do think part of it is that it is now my primary computer--and the portability definitely helps it to become even more primary than a desktop would be. In a way, I wonder if it's like the difference in concern you show over a place you rent and a place you own--when you work full-time, they maintain a computer you use most of the time for you, so you don't have to worry about it as much if your home computer goes on the fritz. It's like getting to rent a computer (without having to pay). But when your primary computer is your own, you really want that computer to work well all the time. And you know you'll have to worry more about the details if it's not working (sort of like when you own a house). I doubt if that's deep, but it seems true at the moment...

Article: TV as a Painkiller

2006-08-18T12:45:00.000-06:00

TV found to be a painkiller for children: An interesting article from USAToday. I've certainly noticed the numbing power of TV when I'm going through a particularly stressful time, so I can certainly understand that this study would have turned out this way. Hm, I wonder if the painkilling power would rise or fall with children if they were watching something like "Snakes on a Plane" (which, incidentally, I don't recommend for children or those who are quite conservative) instead of cartoons...

Now That's Some Good Digital Marketing

2006-08-16T23:24:00.000-06:00

So tomorrow night I'm going to the new Samuel L. Jackson film Snakes on a Plane. Seeing as how I haven't gone to the movie theatre to see a movie since Christmas and have only rented one movie in the last year, this is a very special occasion.

I wouldn't have agreed to go now, particularly to such a cheesy-looking movie, had not I gotten an email with a link to a personalized Flash message from Samuel L. Jackson himself seeking to persuade me to go to the movie. He admitted that the title of the movie sounded stupid, which, I thought, was very humble and honest of him. He seemed almost to be making fun of the movie, in fact--which really seemed the only possible way to sell a movie such as Snakes on a Plane, if you ask me. It is at least partly in honor of his having struck just the right tone that I'm going tomorrow night.

To be serious, I am partly going to honor the wonderful job the marketers of the movie have done in promoting the movie. It reminds me of the perfect union of two strategies: the fill-in-the-blanks personalization game reminiscent of the Madlibs game from some of our youths and the beat-it-home repetition marketing strategy used for promoting movies and books throughout Europe (which I'll explain more in a second). Plus it helps that the message is distributed via more than one communications technology: you could get not just an email from Samuel L. Jackson, but also a cell phone call.

The reason the ad campaign reminds me of the European posters for movies and books in subway stations--in which the exact same ad is repeated in exactly the same way all over, making the viewer eventually either want to scream or rush out to see the movie/read the book--isn't that the ad is repeated exactly the same way. (It wouldn't be, seeing as how the ads are personalized.) The reason it reminds me of this strategy of marketing is the repetition within the ad of the name of the movie over and over, until you either want to scream or rush out and see the movie.

In this case, I'm choosing the latter option. I tell myself, as I'm sure the marketers intend me to, that I'm doing it for the kitsch value of it. But really I'm doing it to honor an excellent job of persuasion. I took "Persuasion and Propaganda" in my undergraduate years--I know a good job when I see it. I know people like me were the target of this promotion, and they did a great job of hitting their target, so, although I feel a bit guilty about it, I'm leaving my nine free library movies sitting at home and am digging a bit into my grad school budget to go see Snakes on a Plane. (Plus, Samuel L. Jackson has an amazing voice. And, well, he threatened my life if I didn't go to the movie.)

P.S. (Aug. 18, '06, 1:31 a.m.) I just got back from having coffee after the movie, and I must report: I haven't laughed that hard in a long, long time. I'm still not sure if I was laughing at or with the movie and in what proportions, but I don't think it matters. I think it helps to have very low expectations when going into it, and I think it also helped to have a crowd that cheered frequently. All I can say is, "Snakes on a plane, folks. Snakes on a plane." (By the way, I also appreciate the assonance in the title. I think it helps the comic effect considerably.) Not to give away any key plot points or anything, but there certainly was a plane. And there were snakes on it. Many of them. Multiple colors and sizes and breeds. So yeah, I think that's all I have to say. Well played, marketers of "Snakes on a Plane." Well played.

Transportation Technology=Communications Technology? Part 2

2006-08-06T00:54:00.000-06:00

So now that I've driven 95 hours and almost 6000 miles in less than a month, I can report more fully on the capabilities and limitations of the automobile as a communications device.

The car CAN communicate/facilitate:

hugs of family and friends, particularly nieces and nephews (wonderful and hard to get through other communications media)
mosquito bites and heat and humidity (also hard through other media, but some would prefer not having them communicated in any case--good to whine about, though)
the sight of Walden Pond and the feel of its water on the skin (lovely on a warm day, especially for one studying Thoreau, and hard to get properly through a photo, even in The Annotated Walden)
the smell of baking garbage on the streets of New York (ditto the comment from the mosquito bites et al.)
lots of in-person conversations, complete with the bobbing eyelids of friends who are getting sleepy as you talk late at night (lovely and easier to interpret than through the phone)

The car CAN'T communicate:

as quickly as other communications media (unless you're driving just down the street, in which case you might as well walk for the exercise)
as simultaneously as other communication media (no switching lines as with phones or cc'ing to more than the group of people than can be assembled in the vehicle and/or caravan)
as virtually as other communications media (it's shockingly real-world, which is often wonderful but can at times, as in the list above, be seen as a drawback if, for instance, you don't want the mosquito bites or the sweat rolling down your back)
as cheaply these days, what with the cost of gas and such

As with most other communications technology, the automobile is also prone to occasional "dropped calls" or "delivery delays," though oddly enough, this sort of thing, when a vehicle is involved, may actually increase the numbers of people you communicate with (which is roughly the case with the other media as well, in which a problem in communicating with someone may cause communication with one or more customer service representatives of the company facilitating the service).

To draw an illustration from out of the air (i.e., somewhere near the early part of this week), a flat tire--or even, say, two flat tires on subsequent days--is likely to delay the communications you wished to make with people at your destination, but may, in the case of the first flat tire, facilitate communications with a police officer stopping on the side of the road, an emergency roadside assister with a much better jack than your car came with, and/or other people in other vehicles, and in the case of the second (who carries two spare tires?), family and/or friends, insurance agents, tow truck guys, tire diagnosers, fixers, and salesmen, etc. Which is to say that in case one communications technology--such as an automobile--may fail, it's always good to keep one or more other communications devices--such as a cell phone--handy.

The corollary to this final point--that transportation technology facilitates communication with random people you may meet along the way--is, besides its communication of fully-rounded experiences (exercising all the senses at once), one of the best things about this form of communications technology. We've rather discouraged random sorts of these communications through many other media--in phones there's the do not call list, in email there's spam laws--and rightly so, considering the blatant exploitations of the technology that caused the discouragement. But using transportations technology (and, at times, our own feet), we may still meet new acquaintances and have conversations with them if we choose (and they agree). Those unexpected meetings enrich our lives, yet I fear we risk losing these sorts of serendipities in our society by limiting ourselves too wholly to other communications media... I hope we never lose them.

The Connection Between Snail Mail and IM

2006-08-02T18:32:00.000-06:00

In a face-to-face conversation brought to me by my lovely, if slightly glitchy communications technology of my automobile (which I'll blog about more later), my friend Angela and I were talking about the immediacy of cell phones and such in comparison to the older communications technology of snail mail. She was talking about how much we've become accustomed to the speed of such communications and was comparing that concept to the time when people would wait for letters to arrive elsewhere.

And that reminded me of the way people who wrote to each other frequently in the "olden days" would have letters cross in the mail, leading to lots and lots of conversation threads that may or may not have been tied up. Which led to a thought: IM definitely has something in common with that mode of frequent letter-writing.

In fact, some of my friends have complained about using IM simply because you often get several threads going on at once in an IM conversation. It's true that it does happen in IM, and that it's sometimes hard to get them all tied up, but is much easier than it was in letter writing, where there were often paper constraints to deal with. It's certainly interesting to think of the two media having some of the same phenomena in common...

I don't know if it's profound (after all, heat + humidity + camping with some mosquitoes and need to get up and on the road early recently hasn't produced much quality sleep), but there it is. Instant messaging might be faster and more informal, but it's sort of fun to think it's at least a bit like the older communications technologies that have been wandering around.

Another (Rather Nice) Obsession Made Possible by Technology

2006-07-22T15:04:00.000-06:00

So this week I've been enjoying a proto-Waldenian retreat at a pond. Okay, so it was a lake. And it wasn't just me, but also my 9 nearest relations. At, not a small cabin with bare furnishings, but a 4-bedroom cottage with most of the trimmings. No phone, it's true, but a full kitchen complete with microwave, a TV with 20 or 30 channels. No DVD player, but then we brought one with us, along with an iPod with speakers (not a video one, but lots of music and podcasts) and 3 laptops we could have watched movies on (though mostly my brothers played Civilization 4 on opposite sides of the room and chatted about it).

So that's all to explain that the retreat was only proto-Waldenian. But that's okay. It was nice, but I must say that I'm rather glad to be back to email and Internet again. Thoreau I'm not, and that's okay.

But that's not what I wanted to blog about. What I wanted to talk about was my viewing of the first season of House last week. And, since I never blogged about it a couple of months ago, I thought I'd also mention my super-West Wing first-five-season marathon of a couple months ago, in which I gulped down five seasons' worth of my favorite show in a little over 10 days (it was before my spring/summer classes started).

The thing I noticed most during both of my DVD TV-show marathons (something almost everyone I know, even those who don't watch much TV on TV, seems to be doing lately) was the impressive sustained storytelling in these shows. When you watch the shows week by week, you're excited to find out what's happening next, but you don't notice to nearly the same degree how much ongoing character development and big-picture plot development is going on slowly over the course of a season and even from season to season. It's pretty amazing, really, and quite creatively stimulating for me as a novel-length storyteller.

Of course, the sustained storytelling, when you have an opportunity to see it all at once like that, makes it like one long movie. Which means it's sort of hard to stop watching. Soon you find yourself staying up till 4 a.m., watching some over breakfast, etc. It's easy to get obsessive when it's a show you really like (I know I'm not alone in this). It's also amazingly easy to finish a season in less time than you would have thought possible.

The nice thing, of course, is that because you can pause at any time, you can stop at any time to go do other stuff. Which makes me wonder what Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 character Faber would think about this way of viewing TV shows. After all, one of the things he liked about books (as opposed to the TV "parlors" with ongoing programming) was that you could "play God to them" by shutting them to think about them, digest them, and develop opinions about them. DVD TV shows seem to be about halfway in-between: on one hand, they're pretty visual and compelling so they're hard to turn off, but on the other hand, the pausability (and natural breakup into episodes) is a beautiful thing. The latter does give you time to think about what you're viewing.

Of course, TV has had these capabilities for at least 25 years, since VCRs came out, but the DVD TV show trend (and the iTunes selling-shows extension) moves the ability to watch whole seasons from organized TV viewers like my dad into the mainstream, where anyone can not just buy, but also go to the library and borrow whole seasons of shows.

And the fact that so many people are doing it fascinates and amazes me. I don't know if it's a completely good or bad thing or not, but it's certainly an interesting trend, and there are at least a few genuinely good shows worth watching this way. And let no one say that today's generations have no attention spans or senses of dedication and commitment. :)

Transportation Technology=Communications Technology?

2006-07-12T10:22:00.000-06:00

So in my 26 hours spent bonding with my car earlier this week, I had a crazy thought: could transportation technology, at least at times, be considered communications technology? Sure, it's not always what you think of when you think of communicating with other people, but there are lots of family and friends I wouldn't be communicating with face-to-face if I didn't have such devices as cars to facilitate that face-to-face communication. The same goes for business travelers who fly all over the place to network and have meetings with people--in those cases, airplanes almost become a kind of communications technology for them.

Of course, when I was a kid going on family vacations, I always thought the car gave me a little too much access to communicating with my family for a bit too long of a time in a bit too cramped of a space, and transportation technology also facilitates seeing and experiencing things as well as people, but all the same, I find it an interesting thought. Granted, I have been spending a lot of time in my car lately (something on which I'm glad to blame the long sentences and Victorian-style italics in this post)...

P.S. (7/13/06) It occurs to me that the North American Laura-Ingalls-Wilder-type pioneers--with their covered wagons and long arduous travels--would certainly have seen cars and airplanes as wonderful communications technology devices.

Cartoon about how Legitimacy Is Affected by Technology

2006-07-08T13:31:00.000-06:00

Cat and Girl Versus Legitimacy: Hilarious Cartoon about the debate about whether technological and societal advances have helped or hurt legitimacy of people's voices. Having just taken a class in textual scholarship (the history and the future of the book, etc.) where very similar topics were debated in very similar language, I find it hilarious as well as providing good stuff to think about. Thanks to Rilla for linking to it (and for blogging about my "Epiphany about Blogs" post).

The Grapes of Wrath Today?

2006-07-04T09:41:00.000-06:00

Grapes of Wrath and Communications Technology: Amy Gahran, one of the bloggers I've been watching the longest for quotes on web writing style and implications, has an interesting take on whether Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath could take place in today's media conditions.

My Epiphany about Blogs

2006-07-03T10:55:00.000-06:00

It occurred to me, in a blinding flash, the other day. Okay, so maybe there wasn't actually a flash, but I had a thought, which for an M.A. student in her last week of classes (working furiously to get to the "All But Thesis" state) is a pretty amazing thing.

My thought was that blogs are not so much like online journals (to which they are so often compared) as they are like the kind of "open letters" sent in the eighteenth century (around Alexander Pope's day). Back then, when you sent a letter to someone else in the literate society, you knew there was a possibility that it could get published at some point or other, which meant that although it was a private expression, it was also open to public comment.

This description of the eighteenth-century trend is more than slightly oversimplifying the matter, but the point is that the openness and community orientation of blogs makes them different than just online journals. And the eighteenth century practice of printing letters--which were often followed with printed agreements and disagreements--is the closest thing I can think of to what a blog does in our society today.

Of course, there probably are blogs that authors treat like online journals. That is, I could see that blog authors could get easily lulled into thinking that a blog is a completely private journal or a letter to only a few friends (fine if you can avoid names, etc.--which means, again, recognizing the public dimension--but I believe recent errors along that sort of line have gotten some people into trouble with potential employers, etc.).

One fascinating experiment with the "online journal" concept is the guy who's throwing the nineteenth-century author Henry David Thoreau's journal entries up on the Web as blog entries. Then again, the fact that much of the material in Thoreau's journal was re-worked and then re-used in his lectures and in works such as Walden and The Maine Woods seems to show that Thoreau's journal wasn't necessarily a purely "private" journal either--he, too, seems to have had a public audience in mind for some of the material down the road. (I'm sure I'll be able to report much more precisely and authoritatively on this matter once I get further into my thesis research.)

The point is that public/private, even when it comes to personal journals and letters, has been a bit squishy longer than blogs have been around. The method--and some of its implications--may be new, but the concepts behind it aren't.

Quote about Technology's Affect on Our Wonder

2006-06-27T08:02:00.000-06:00

"It may be that as civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. But it is ironic that just as technology frees us to be full human beings, not mere survivors of the earth's rigors, at this very moment we may be about to lose the whole planet because we have lost our sense of wonder. For finally only reverence can restrain violence, violence against nature, violence against one another."

--William Sloane Coffin in Credo

Okay, so I've been meaning to post this for a month because I really liked this quote. He's right--it's a crucial Catch-22. It's easy to be amazed at first at how easy things become to do with technology, but our sense of entitlement tends to grow with the easier things are to do. And when we feel entitled it's hard to be amazed by things. And when we're not amazed by things it's hard to treat them with respect. And when we're used to being not-amazed at some things it's easy to become not amazed by other things. I'm not one for the slippery slope, but this argument has more irony and reality to it than slipperyness. Some genuine food for thought. (Hm, funny how sometimes it takes me a month to decide that's really all that needs to be said.)

A Bird Better than a Recording Studio

2006-06-25T14:37:00.000-06:00

Video of a Bird Who Can Imitate Chainsaws, Etc.: I've been thinking a lot lately about the false dichotomy between what we think of as the complex, cool things technology can do and the "simplicity" of nature. In honor of this train of thought, I decided to post a link to this bird video which turns that idea upside-down. Thanks to my former colleague Calvin for the link.

P.S. I wonder if the bird would hiss and meow if it ran into a cat? That would confuse the heck out of my cats, at least...

How I Learned to Like ;) Emoticons

2006-06-17T01:26:00.000-06:00

I was IMing earlier with a friend who's just gotten on MSN Messenger, and was therefore reflecting on how I changed from an emoticon snob to someone who quite likes them--in their place, which in my mind is only in IM conversations except for judiciously placed smileys :) and winkys ;) in emails to be sent to people you already know.

I fully admit that a part of the reason I like them in IM has nothing to do with better communication beyond spreading amusement with the little animated ones--my favorite in messenger is the little one that squinches up his eyes before crying. (I actually go out of my way sometimes to find appropriate occasions to use that one.)

But the real reason I was converted to emoticons within the IM environment is that they're actually very important to communicate tonality in a conversational medium that otherwise lacks the nonverbals a face-to-face conversation would have. However cheesy they look, they actually play an important role in IM communication--provided the people you're chatting with have a comparable viewer with all the same emoticons so they don't get hit over the head with the complicated ASCII-character-based hard-to-decipher versions that seem a bit overly in-group for those who know them.

But I don't agree with the extended use of them in emails (for which they were actually invented). There's just so many email programs that chances are, someone's going to see the clunky ASCII-based variations there. And so using anything there beyond a simple :) and ;)--which seem fairly self-explanatory--seems like it would not only be showing off, but would hinder communication rather than helping it.

Okay, so reading over this I'm thinking that I haven't lost all my emoticon snobbishness--but I've certainly warmed up to them. :)

The Occasional, Mysterious, Self-Healing Power of Technology

2006-06-17T00:29:00.000-06:00

Today I walked out to my car, and for the first time in over a month, when I half-heartedly depressed the "unlock" button on my car remote, the doors actually unlocked. I can't account for it. For weeks when I've pressed that button, nothing's happened, forcing me to--gasp!--actually walk up and turn the key in the lock to unlock the door. As a girl who's studying the simple life in such works as Walden for my thesis, I hate to admit it, but it had annoyed me quite a bit.

(I justify my concern by saying that it wasn't so much the inconvenience that bothered me so much, but the niggling worry that since the internal trunk release also wasn't working, it could be a beginning symptom of one of those large expensive electrical problems that could cost me money I don't have. But yes, the inconvenience was also obnoxious.)

So I had nearly reconciled myself to having it checked out at some point. I had given up the hope that a mere battery for the remote would fix it. I had mourned the loss of the ability to lock and unlock my car from a hundred yards away. I had (nearly) moved on.

And today when it worked again, it was a bit, well, mysterious. My heart leapt within me with joy, and yet I was a little bit scared by the sudden resurrection of my remote. I'm still not sure what to do with it. The experience makes me understand people's fears of Artificial Intelligences and other technology developing beyond what we can handle. It's hard to know exactly how to react.

Speaking of serendipity, Saturday's "Writer's Almanac" poem--the one that just arrived in my inbox--seems an appropriate response to the delightful side of the thing, so I'll include a bit of it here:

Blessings

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

Ah, the Peace...and Ring Tones

2006-06-14T09:41:00.000-06:00

Fishing hole is no place to share life's details on cell phone: Interesting article from the Anchorage Daily News about how technology is taking the silence out of the great outdoors. Of course, cell phones are very handy in some sort of emergency, but it seems that they can definitely be abused. This article puts that case well...

Word Processing and Novelists

2006-06-14T09:10:00.000-06:00

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today (June 14, 2006): "For the first thirty years or so of the history of computers, it was mostly businesses that used them for accounting purposes. But in the 1980s, the word processing powers of computers made them attractive to writers—although Stephen King said that when he first started using a word processor, he lost the ability to pace himself by the number of pages he had written, and his books grew longer and longer. Russell Baker said, 'Computers make writing so painless that the writer cannot bear to stop. On and on the writer goes, all judgment numbed. Before you know it, you've written a book.' Some contemporary writers still don't use computers. Joyce Carol Oates writes all her first drafts in longhand. Don DeLillo still uses a manual typewriter.

"But, the novelist Stanley Elkin called his word processor a 'bubble machine.' He said, 'The word processor enables one to concentrate exponentially; you have absolute command of the entire novel all at once. You can go back and reference and change and fix ... so in a way, all novels written on the bubble machine ought to be perfect novels.'"

I find, like Joyce Carol Oates, that I write my first drafts of most creative writing in longhand. And yet once I have it all typed in, I can see Stanley Elkin's point. And that, ironically, is one reason why I didn't write my first draft of my novel manuscript onscreen. If I could "go back and reference and change and fix" indefinitely during the first draft, I would still be doing that, not with the whole novel, but with the first chapter. Without seeing those real, blank pages to fill and guilt me into working on them instead of tinkering with what came before, I wouldn't have finished.

The Weight of Paper

2006-06-02T01:19:00.000-06:00

So last week I got back a politely worded rejection of one of my novel-excerpts-turned-stories. Seeing as how I've become thick-skinned to this sort of thing from working within the wide world of publishing, my main response was not "Oh my goodness! The entire world hates my stuff and I want to die!"

Instead, I sort of hm'ed and might have let out a half-sigh when I got the email. The sigh was partly because I'd been rejected. But mostly it was because that meant that the next journals on my carefully-researched list of venues were all ones that would only take submissions by mail. And that meant that I was going to have to print stuff off. And pay to send it off. And trust the glorious union of the Canadian and American postal systems to get my submissions to the right place in a reasonable amount of time (and when you're planning on 4 to 6 month reading times as it is, another 2 weeks for it to get there isn't a thrilling prospect).

Basically, it felt like a lot of time and energy (not to mention the expense) to send things by paper mail instead of the oh-so-easy email many of us have grown to love. But I was committed to keeping things in the submission cycle at all times. So on Monday I did it (in spite of a crazy homework day).

And once it was done, it felt like a more significant event than the last couple of submissions, which I did by email. Email is easier, but, perhaps because it takes less effort, has less emotion attached to it. I had one of those small twinges of the overused metaphorical creative writer "sending out one's babies" emotion when I sent it by email, but when I sent it by mail, I really felt it. Perhaps a part of this is the seemingly greater damageability of the paper en route, as well as the uncertainty of the timing of the delivery--both things I take for granted knowing instantly when sending an email.

But there was more to it than all that. It's true that sending things out by mail costs quite a bit more--even the in-Canada submission was a chunk because it was the longer story--but there is something to be said for paper. In spite of its inconveniences, it has a greater feeling of accomplishment attached to it.

I wonder if that's one of the reasons we've come to expect so much productivity of ourselves in today's society--if you've done it by email, it doesn't feel like you've done as much. I wonder what would happen to the pace and sense of accomplishment of people in today's society if everyone had to do at least half of their correspondence (including business correspondence) using paper and the postal system. Would be interesting to see. Not that I'd be keen on being in on the experiment itself, mind you. But I wonder whether, if the experiment was tried long-term, whether people would gradually come to feel like they had done more.

My Life as a (Faux)Geek

2006-05-25T23:44:00.000-06:00

Some days I realize I'm a geek, or at least a faux-geek. Yesterday was one of those days, and the realization leaked over into today. The occasion for this particular realization was that yesterday I got my student copy of my new bibliographical software program (Endnote), and I got inordinately excited about it. (To be fair, at least I'm surrounded by other academics, so I found other people who thought it was cool too. Plus, I wouldn't be quite as excited about it had I not gotten my copy only a few days after my thesis proposal was officially accepted.)

The thing is that it is a wonderful program for a girl embarking on a 80-100 page M.A. thesis with 50 or more books and articles that I'll be trying to read, keep straight, and potentially quote. What it does is allow you to search for, then download reference information for books, articles, etc. from various databases and library sites. When researching, you can save your notes for the reference in with the rest of the information. Then as you type your paper in Word and add a quotation, it allows you to easily choose the source from the list and formats the citation information and works cited information for you in whatever format you need it in.

Anyway, I'm told that it takes a little time to learn up front, but is indispensible for a large project like a thesis or dissertation. We'll see. If it does half of what it promises, it will help with my thesis. Together with my other favorite organization software tool, StickyBrain (which allows me to right-click and save and organize notes and articles from the Web), I should have to spend a lot less time losing things, then re-researching them later. (Provided, of course, I take notes efficiently the first time from those pesky print sources.)

The "Not Real" vs. the "Real" Part 2--Dishes, Laundry, and Such

2006-05-22T00:05:00.000-06:00

Seeing as how I've just talked about how I need to continue to work on the balance between "not real" and the "real," I thought it would be highly appropriate to note that "not real," virtual, or abstract, activities--including intellectual ones--often don't significantly help one to complete "real" chores, something that monastics have been balancing for centuries and Thoreau also addressed within Walden.

To illustrate, some examples of abstract, virtual, or activities that some might otherwise class as "not real" (though some of them are actually my job at the moment): spending much time in thought and on the computer completing class-work-related activities, and at home with the TV on, whether watching a DVD or something else, or with it off and nourishing my creativity with a good book, researching venues to which to send my novel, working on new short story and novel ideas.

Some examples of "real" activities that I cannot make my cats do while I'm working on the above: washing dishes, doing laundry, vacuuming, filing those last few boxes from last summer's move (mostly filled with real papers I haven't gotten around to going through, but don't want to outright throw out).

Were I to figure out how to train my cats to handle these and other chores, I'm sure I would have much more time to work on both my "abstract" and "real" communication tasks, as well as the reality-based long walks I'd love to take more of now that it's gorgeous weather out. I'd love to take any suggestions for completing these activities, either virtually or via cat-labor. If not, I'm sure I'll get to more of them soon now that my West Wing marathon has come to an end.

(Side note: I did dispose of the paper-filing problem this weekend by lining the boxes up, draping a sheet over them, and calling them a coffee-table. It makes a good place to put my laptop, and the cats like to sit on it. So let no one say I accomplished nothing real and useful while in graduate school. I left out the case of paper for sending out novel manuscripts, however, so I could continue to trip over it until the book gets accepted somewhere.)

The "Not Real" vs. the "Real"

2006-05-20T01:25:00.000-06:00

I was telling someone tonight that I like to turn on The Lord of the Rings while I'm writing a paper, because then it's there for me to pop in and out of and usually lasts about as long as it takes to write a draft of a ten-page paper. In the conversation that followed, she mentioned that she supposed TV could be a kind of company in a way. Since then, I've been thinking about the potentially good and potentially bad aspects of that.

First, the potentially bad. There's something that seems a bit anti-social (in the standard colloquial sense of the word as opposed to the psychological sense of the word) about the act. After all, if I didn't live alone and had to interact with a real person during my paper-writing, I would have to deal with a real person who might not distract me when I wanted to be distracted. They might interrupt me right in the middle of a thought. And that might be good for me. Make me less self-centered about the sanctity of "my" time.

There is definitely something to be said for this angle. I would hate to "grow up" to be one of those curmudgeonly people whose life was built around things and people who didn't take me out of myself and my needs at times. As Thomas Lynch, poet and undertaker, writes about the culture's paradigm shift from caskets surrounded by family, friends, and co-religionists to golf bag-themed caskets surrounded by co-hobbyists: "we are...required, as [Robert Pogue Harrison] insists, to choose 'an allegiance--either to the posthuman, the virtual, and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their cosmic densities.'" There is something that seems wrong about abandoning human community for the TV.

But then, I can't believe that it's all gloom and doom for my movie-watching "company." After all, seeking company in the company of characters in a DVD is no worse than seeking it in books or any other form of story, or the "not real." Including the characters that occasionally find their home in my fiction-writer's (admittedly odd) brain and leak their way out onto paper. As Margaret Atwood writes in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, "not real can tell us about real." Through story, through these odd unreal characters that jump into our brains from books and movies and TV shows, we can learn about who we are in relation to other very real people and things.

Children's writer Katherine Paterson, in an article called "Making Meaning," balances both of the aspects of this question--interaction on a "virtual" and a "real" level--nicely: "As a writer I can try to make meaning for...children through the words of a story, but I can't stop there, thinking that my task as meaning-maker is done. Nor, I dare say, can you. It is up to each of us not simply to write the words [or take in the story], but to be the word of hope, of faith, of love."

Although she was saying that her role as a writer should be balanced with the role of the in-person teacher/mentor/parent in children's lives, her point seems to be a valid one for the current discussion as well. Both the "not real"--or the virtual, or the symbolic--and the "real" are important, and if we live in either of them exclusively, we risk losing something in our lives. So I think I'll continue to watch the Lord of the Rings during paper-writing times, but I'll also continue to, from time to time, write in places where people can interrupt me.

Hilarious Onion Story

2006-05-17T12:30:00.000-06:00

Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis: This article, which I found hilarious--admittedly at least partly because I'm about to hand in my M.A. thesis proposal--gives a twist to the idea that technology makes it easy for anyone to write lots of material.

Is the Visual Overcoming the Written?

2006-05-13T00:30:00.000-06:00

“We recognize that the use of image and icon is fast displacing the written word as the dominant communication system of our culture—a trend easily identified when Nike can strip its name from the swoosh icon without losing an ounce of brand recognition or equity—but we fail to perceive what the new iconic symbol system truly has the capacity to do and undo.” –Shane A. Hipps, The Hidden Power of Electronic Media

I understand Hipps' point about understanding what icons can and can't do, but I disagree with him on two points: (1) that image is a stronger communication system than the written word in today's culture, and (2) that the power of image and icon is something remotely new.

As to the first point, with email and IM and blogging and all the rest, many of us are writing and reading more than ever before. It doesn't mean we're writing and reading high quality material all the time, but we're writing and reading a lot. Image and icon are strengthening, but that doesn't mean they're overcoming writing. And that's important to remember.

Which brings me to my second point. Image and icons have always had power. In fact, before we had the printed word, most people only ever learned through image, icon and auditorially. So the Nike swoosh without the words is hardly a new concept--in fact, it's a very old one. And the thing is that I'm not sure the power of image has lessened over the years. Even in writing, we use imagery all the time. And although that's different from actual images, it evokes them in our heads.

So images have been around for a long time. And writing isn't going away. That doesn't invalidate Hipps' point, but it certainly raises questions in my head about it. I do wonder what new things are happening with icons, images, and the written word--I think it's quite possible new things might be happening with them. But the media themselves are hundreds of years old, and neither of them is going away.

Deborah (re)Discovers* Podcasts

2006-04-30T21:45:00.000-06:00

I’d been working in the Internet biz, so I heard about podcasting since about the time people started playing with it--a few months after iPods were released. I heard all the hype. It was this innovative new way of listening to the radio without having to have a radio, whenever you wanted to listen to a segment. It was to be very exciting.

And I thought: “Oh boy, another new technology to keep up with. *Sigh.* Won’t do much good until there’s enough decent content to be worth listening to.” (When you work in the constantly-evolving world of the Web, it's somewhat easy to get a wee bit cynical.)

A few months ago, I discovered that the time for lots of decent podcasting content has come. And now that iTunes supports regular podcast downloads, I actually started to subscribe to a few. And now I listen to them. Sometimes. I don’t listen to them all the time, but I have fun with them sometimes.

Ironically, when I listen to them (which isn’t as frequently as I read my email subscriptions), I don’t do it on my iPod. I listen to them on my computer rather than on my iPod—I love my iPod but I’m too busy listening to music and audio books on it to keep up with podcasts on the device they’re named for.

I do like podcasts. I’m studying in Canada right now, but I’m an American, so it’s lovely to listen to NPR whenever I want to. And it’s nice to listen to free radio-like broadcasts when I’m not near a radio or the Internet. And it’s fun to choose when I want to listen to them. And if I want to share them with someone else from far away, it’s easier than with radio, even Internet radio.

So what’s the point? New communications technologies take awhile to catch on. And if they do catch on eventually with the general public, it’s because they’re well-supported. And good content helps tremendously.

All the same, I don’t think podcasting is the huge new wave I’d heard it was. Sure, it’s delightful to listen to live local acoustic music from Long Island whenever I want, and it’s easier than taping the radio used to be, but it’s really not that different. And, like most media, it’s not necessarily going to replace other media, though it might change the way we consume other media and in what proportions we consume it, as well as open up opportunities to participate in faraway communities. Which is of course both good and bad.

No matter what, it’s interesting to think about. Oh, and for those of you creating good podcasts, make sure they’re submitted to the iTunes directory. That’s the only way I and lots of other people will ever get around to subscribing to them.

* The parenthesizing of partial words is quite popular in academic writing, so I thought I’d try it since this was the first time I’d ever found an opportunity to use this fascinating (rather e. e. cummings-like) way to use words.

Moose, Communication, and Technology

2006-04-22T11:09:00.000-06:00

Sterling Safety: Group Studies High-Tech Ways to Prevent Road Collisions: I read a lot of articles about moose in Alaska. One does when one is working on a novel that is about a moose artist who lives in Alaska. But it is not often that I find an article so well suited to my media researcher side as well. So I'm quite excited.

The scoop as to why I’m excited (besides the fact that weird stories about moose fascinate me) goes back to last summer when my friend Brenda and I were driving to Alaska. We made lots of jokes about moose not being able to read moose crossing signs on the highway. (I admit it’s entirely possible that these jokes were only funny to us because we'd been in the car for about 200 hours during the course of the trip.)

At any rate, this article sort of sidesteps the humor in those jokes. Because apparently there may soon be ways for moose to communicate with us whether they’ve read the signs or not.

It isn’t all that weird in one way—at least it’s no weirder than those annoying highway signs that tell you how fast you’re going in an effort to slow you down. It’s actually very practical as well. And it’s a good thing—hopefully this new “communication device” will save both some lives: both moose and human ones. Roadkill moose, from what I’ve heard, is good eating once you remove the mushy parts, but its production process, from what I’ve heard, is a rather unpleasant and costly one.

But it is also quirky that moose (other than Bullwinkle) can “tell” us when they’re crossing the road. That’s sort of odd to think about. So I thought I’d link to the article. Because it’s not the sort of example of technology’s connection to communication that we usually think about. And it’s always good for your mind to be stretched.

When Virtual Paper Isn't Enough

2006-04-20T23:09:00.000-06:00

So I found out today that my novel manuscript did not get accepted by the first venue to which I sent it. I can't say that I was shocked. A little disappointed, of course, but not shocked. I worked in publishing. I know how it goes.

So in the next week the goal is to get online and in the stacks at the library to research more venues to which to send the manuscript. Agents, publishers... Important to research carefully and find the right ones. Then to get it back out there.

Some might think I need a rest first. But the thing is, the publishing world is at least partially about persistence. I know this, so I am fully committed to sending it out repeatedly until it gets published. And I have a tangible, trip-over-it-in-the-living-room reminder of my commitment in my living room at home--a case of printer paper I bought after I finished the thrd or fourth draft. Virtual paper is cheaper, but sometimes you need to stub your toe on the real thing a few times to remind yourself of both the need to accomplish your goals and the chances that it will take awhile.

Reflection on Giving Up Solitaire for Lent

2006-04-17T19:48:00.000-06:00

After my previous post about playing solitaire on my computer during the Olympics, I decided to give up solitaire for Lent. (Well, actually, I decided to give up both of the games I played to procrastinate from schoolwork, which meant I also gave up Bejewelled on my cell phone.) Now that Lent is a whole two days past (on the Western calendar, at least) I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my experience. So here goes.

The most interesting part of my journey happened in the first few weeks. I was surprised how guilty I felt when I had to procrastinate in other, less mindless ways. It felt more like procrastinating when I socialized with my classmates, read books I didn't have to read for classes, or even watched TV.

What it came down to was that I had convinced myself that when I was playing solitaire and Bejewelled, I wasn't actually using up as much time as I was. Because I wasn't really using my brain during that time, I had nearly convinced myself that the time I spent playing these games simultaneously: (1) didn't really exist because I didn't use my brain and (2) was somehow necessary because it allowed other ideas to develop under the surface.

The first one wasn't true at all, and the second wasn't nearly as true as I thought it was. Sometimes I'm pretty good at lying to myself.

So anyway, I came to realize that I can be a pretty hard and unreasonable boss sometimes. I realized that it was okay to not spend every minute of my day working on schoolwork (i.e., it was sometimes okay to procrastinate). But I'd somehow come to believe that one of the only ways it was okay to spend some of those mid-day off-hours was to play solitaire, which was silly. Once I gave these games up, I gradually started to have a healthier, more well-balanced set of off-hours activities. Unfortunately, it was still too cold outside for a lot of time spent outside for most of Lent, but I did find myself doing the following:

(1) I found myself watching more TV, then getting sick of it earlier and eventually turning it off quicker. Now it's true that TV isn't all that much healthier than playing solitaire, but it can potentially take a bit more brainpower. And I find that when I force myself to give it all my attention, I eventually turn it off quicker and turn to other activities.

(2) I found myself reading more books that I didn't need to read for my classes. And this was a good thing, since it was around this time that I was reading quite a bit of dystopian speculative fiction for one of my classes. Since very little books of this genre (think 1984 and Fahrenheit 451) have happy endings, I found myself reading a lot of mystery novels (which usually end with some kind of justice) to balance out my book consumption. These books didn't take too much brainpower, but they were more food for thought than solitaire.

(3) I found myself socializing more. I especially had to tell myself that the socializing was okay. For some reason it felt more like I was goofing off if I talked to other people instead of doing my work. Maybe that was because I felt like I was pulling others into my non-working mode as well. But once I realized that others often wanted to socialize and that it was one of the best ways to spend my time (especially since I live alone), I realized that it was a good thing. Not only did I get to blow off steam, discuss ideas, and build community, but also it pulled me out of my sometimes-too-introverted world of self.

So on the whole, I'm rather happy with my Lenten experiment--so happy that I feel no need to go back to playing games now that Lent is over. Now that I made it through a whole paper-writing season without this procrastination tool, then I really don't need it in general. Not that I might not play occasionally in the future at some point. But for now, it's spring, I'm on vacation, and it's nice outside. I'm much too busy taking walks and catching up with friends to play solitaire.

Now That's Why I Bought a Cell Phone

2006-04-13T20:25:00.000-06:00

Five years ago, my avowed reason for turning from a cell-phone hater to a cell-phone buyer was that it would be helpful if I ever got into an emergency when I was driving long distances alone. Well, that and I realized the long distance minutes were nice.

Well, I've used up plenty of long-distance minutes over the years, but I'd never gotten into one of those near-emergency situations that would truly justify the phone's existence. I was sort of thankful for that, but I felt like something was missing. I needed to complete the justification of this gadget's existence in my purse.

This week I got my wish--in the midst of my 26-hour Saskatchewan-to-Michigan end-of-grad-school-term drive.

Let me pick up the story just south of Winnipeg when I turned from the bypass road toward the North Dakota border as the sun was beginning to set. I was alone, 10 hours into an estimated 12 for the day. I was a bit sleep-deprived and just wanted to get to Fargo. I'd been seeing flooded fields all day--it is spring, after all (side note: the buds came out just in time for my arrival in Michigan--I'm very excited). But none of my roads were closed. Until this point, at least. When I turned onto my road, there were road closed signs right away. They were terrible signs, though. Hardly the type that would make me get off the road before I was kicked off. They recommended a detour but didn't tell me how to get to the recommended roads.

So I stayed on the highway until "they" (whoever they was in this case) actually kicked me off. When "they" did that, telling me that the highway was flooded south and giving me helpful arrows pointing both east and west, I turned to the west. I had glanced at my atlas enough while driving to guess that was where the recommended detour was.

But there wasn't a direct road to those other roads. The dusk was coming on. I had a motel reserved in Fargo, 2 hours' drive on the other side of the border. And I was worried about border crossings closing before I made it to one. I needed a quick route--one that was easy to find and not too far out of my way. And my map wasn't terribly detailed. The road I was on wasn't on it. Not that I was terribly surprised at the fact that Manitoba 422 wasn't on it, but still...

So as I turned south on Manitoba 422, I picked up my cell phone and called my friend Brenda.

Why Brenda? We'd driven over similar territory the summer before on the way to Alaska. I knew she was good with maps. And I knew she was good at dealing with me when I was a bit confused.

Brenda was home. And she had wireless internet. So she looked up Google Maps.

What followed was a fascinating lesson in interactive geography. She would tell me if there was a possible road coming up--I would tell her if it looked feasible or not (i.e., whether it was paved or dirt). She would tell me how many streets the village I was coming up to had--I would tell her what kind of buildings it had and how slow I had to go through it.

I could go on, but the upshot of the episode was that she got me to a rather deserted border crossing 42 minutes before it closed, leaving me before my phone went to roaming on the other side of the border with information on what roads were open and what rest areas were closed in North Dakota.

In essence, my 60-mile detour only took me an hour and ten minutes beyond what I'd planned for the trip, which isn't bad as far as "emergencies" go. Doesn't really qualify in some ways at all as an emergency. But then again, without the cell phone it would have been much closer to one. I didn't really have the map I needed to get to a border crossing in time. And as a single female driving alone at night, I probably would have been unlikely to stop to ask directions. And without that friendly voice in my ear, I wouldn't have been nearly as calm as I was.

So, thanks to a combination of my cell phone, my friend Brenda, my old laptop I'd sold to Brenda, a wireless internet connection, Google maps, and road conditions websites, I was fairly painlessly driving into North Dakota on a bright-mooned if occasionally foggy night shortly after I got detoured from the flooded highway. The most dangerous part of the whole experience was the skunk crossing the road in front of me shortly after I made it through customs.

Before I go, there are two points I wanted to make about this incident in connection with my broader points about technology's effect on communication:

Community-building through technology. Many technology nay-sayers claim that technology isolates us--which is sometimes true. But in this case--and many others--it meant that in a very real way, I didn't have to travel alone when I otherwise would have had to.
Intelligence of people who can manage technology. I knew that if I didn't call someone who could read maps--and do it quickly, juggling it with little searches for road conditions, etc.--the call would probably increase my stress and possibly get me more lost than I would have been. Now while it's probably true that you could program a machine--or a GPS router--to do most of what Brenda did, I'm not sure I would trust it to be as good at reacting to my frequent "not-taking-that-road-because-it's-gravel" route changes. I was glad I was definitely glad I was being directed by Brenda, not a GPS system.

No matter what the effects of technology were on the experience, what's clear is that in my post-end-of-the-semester grad school state, the low layer of occasional fog (over which I could always see the bright-mooned sky), seemed to be some sort of emblem of the evening. It's also clear that once I hit the bed at my motel a bit later, I slept the blissful sleep of the sleep-deprived for 8 1/2 hours before heading on to Chicago the next day...

Will androids take over the earth? Or will technology just take over our heads?

2006-04-04T23:40:00.000-06:00

Some of you may question whether androids will take over the earth. Some of you may stay up late some nights wondering if that will happen. Whether we'll create such sentient technology that we'll have to give it the status of another living being.

If you're one of those people, I must say that I'm not in your camp.

I can honestly say I've never worried about whether androids, were they to become popular, would ever take over the world or deserve the status of human beings. I don't think, at the current time, technology's headed in that direction. I suppose that's why I'm not convinced by books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Neuromancer by William Gibson.

However, I am fascinated by a related question asked in some of these sorts of speculative fiction books, one I think is more likely. That question is whether we will biologically engineer some sort of technology connected with the human body that will blur the lines between us and technology.

Take, for instance, the technology implanted in humans in one of my favorite recent books: Feed by M. H. Anderson. Implanted in people's brains, the "feed" allows for someone to constantly experience the Internet, TV, telepathic email, etc. all the time. One of the really scary parts of this device is the individualized marketing based on mood. So for instance, if a character is feeling depressed, he might get a message from the "feed" that he can cheer up by buying a sweater from so-and-so shop online, and instantly do that.

The scarier thing is that the teenagers in this book respond positively to that kind of invitation.

I tend to emphasize the positive sides of technology more often than not, but the warning in this aspect of the book hits not too far from the mark. It's not as if people haven't escaped their true emotional needs for years by other means, but technology does behoove us to be more and more intentional about how we respond to such stimuli (which are already pretty easy to find around us). And what happens to humanity if technology becomes so "user-friendly" that it's part of us?

Fascinating book--won lots of awards. I highly recommend it.

That said, I have a paper to work on for one of my classes--sort of wish there was an easier way than to have to extract the information painstakingly from my head and insert it into the laptop, then re-write to make sure it all made sense. Hm... Maybe there is a market for a reverse kind of feed... But then again, if it integrated with our brains as well as the implants did in Feed, I'd be sporting unidentified lesions on my skin in a matter of years...

I suppose there's no way around it. I'll have to write the essay the old-fashioned way--from my brain to my fingers keyboarding the words into the laptop. *sigh* Life's so rough these days. :)

The First Issue of The Fieldstone Review is Live!

2006-03-29T15:12:00.000-06:00

My excuse for posting this slightly brazen, seemingly-marketing-driven post is that I'm excited. After all, as Senior Fiction Reader for The Fieldstone Review, I've read a lot of fiction submissions in recent months. So I'm happy to announce that the inaugural issue of the journal is now live. I'd like to particularly draw your attention to the story "Why Jesus Santos Lost His Faith" by Leslie Wayne Jones.

(The current excuse for the blatantly Fieldstone-promotional nature of this post is that the Fieldstone is an online literary journal, which means that it hits all the topics of this blog, simply by communicating creative writing through the Internet.)

iPods at Work

2006-03-28T20:22:00.000-06:00

Music hath charms for some workers — others it annoys: This article at USAToday evocatively discusses the new phenomenon of people listening to iPods and other MP3 players at work. The most interesting part of the article is the part that talks about people who actually sing as they're listening. It seems that some people don't know how to use common sense...

The Occasional Bliss of Being Useless

2006-03-05T23:03:00.000-06:00

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately (notably Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut and Mockingbird by Walter Tevis) in which technology takes over the function of humans, taking away livelihoods and making humans useless. In these worlds, some of the humanity is replaced at the same time. However much I understand the authors' concern, which was/is a valid one in some respects, most days I find myself wishing something I’ve wished for years: that is, I wish I allowed myself a bit more time off in compensation for how much faster I can do things because of technology.

I can tell most of these types of books were written pre-personal computer and pre-Internet. Since then, I remember related concerns that surfaced around the beginning of these and other technologies that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. People were concerned that they would take away jobs, that the unemployment rate would go up.

It’s true that some jobs have gone away because of various technological devices. But it seems that what's happened is more that the job market has shifted, not lessened. And somehow, work days (at least in North America) have not, for the most part, gotten any shorter because the technology works so much faster. We just expect more of ourselves and each other. Even an older invention—electrical lights—has changed things more than we realize. With the use of a few watts, we can stretch our work hours as long as we want. And some people do.

That said, I think I’m going to post this so I can do something completely “useless” and unproductive and non-mechanical (and profoundly, enjoyably human) with my late-night electricity. There’s this great mystery novel I’ve been reading…

The Simple Life; or, Looking for Wireless in Whitehorse

2006-02-23T09:57:00.000-06:00

It was about 6 months ago that I returned to Saskatoon after a 12,000-mile driving/camping trip to Alaska and Michigan and back. I loved that trip.

It was the simple life.

My friend Brenda and I slept in a tent when we didn’t have the opportunity of crashing on someone’s floor or, sometimes, slightly better conditions. (I dimly remember a bed every once in awhile. That was lovely.)

We bought a few groceries every so often and sometimes cooked over a fire. We ate out a few times, but not very often.

We stopped on almost every long driving day to get at least one walk or hike in. We stopped for bears and herds of bison crossing the road and took detours down gravel roads to see waterfalls. We experienced many beautiful things firsthand.

That is to say, in many ways, it was a very simple, physical, elemental time. And yet, besides the wonderful people we spent time with and the natural beauties we experienced, some of the things I’m most thankful for from the trip were technology-related. I’ll just list a few of them:

An iPod with FM transmitter: Since I was moving to Saskatoon, we had a U-Haul truck for about 30 hours of the trip. With only a radio in a vehicle to help the driver stay awake, an iPod with an 8-hour mix made just for the trip—and with audio books on it for the occasional change of pace—was just the thing. And if the other person was asleep, it was safer for the driver to not have to change CDs all the time.
A digital camera: I’d used a digital camera at work before, but this was my first vacation with one. We borrowed a digital camera from some of Brenda’s friends, and it was lovely to look at our pictures right away—and not have to worry about wasting film.
A laptop and wireless: I’d had a laptop before, but I’d mostly used it at home and had only gotten a wireless card a few months before, but I hadn't tried out the wireless away from home much. It was lovely—and sort of amusing—how excited we’d get when we found a coffee shop, ice cream shop, or restaurant with free wireless so we could send emails and get online.
A travel blog: Lots of people we knew wanted to hear about our adventures. But we didn’t necessarily want the rest of the world to hear. So I hunted up MyTripJournal.com, which for a small fee would let us have a password-protected blog complete with 120 photos, maps to show where we were going and where we’d been, a guest book, and unlimited entries for two months. It was just the right way to tell our friends and families about our adventures without sharing them with the whole world. We could have just kept personal journals and told stories, but it wouldn't have been the same.

I’m definitely not the sort of person who likes camping with a TV and all the other conveniences. But I can’t deny that these items—made out of complex technology—enhanced the trip. For that matter, they give me an easy way to look back at it when I’m feeling nostalgic, as I am today. All I have to do is simply turn on my Sask-Alaskan Adventure mix on my iPod, open up my album in iPhoto and read my archived version of the blog on my laptop.

Cluttertasking during the Olympics

2006-02-14T19:59:00.000-06:00

As I’m writing this post, the TV is on in the background. I often find myself doing things like this lately, but last night that I realized something was wrong. That is, I was having trouble just watching the Olympics without doing something else. I was playing solitaire at the same time. Part of the evening, this worked—after all, I didn’t feel much need to actually watch all of the downhill skiing, so I just used the commentary to cue me into the times I really wanted to look at the screen.

The problem came when I started watching figure skating. I really wanted to watch this event. But I found it hard to put down the laptop and just watch. I had to unglue my eyes from my game when it came to the key performances. I realized it was a bad thing.

This doesn’t always happen to me. When I’m completely healthy, it usually doesn’t, so when it does happen, it usually tells me something is wrong. Last night it was because I was tired and full of nervous energy at the same time. I couldn’t focus on the Olympics or anything else involving more brainpower. Nor could I focus on just the game. I needed lots of stimulus to keep me going until I could figure out what was bothering me and simultaneously tiring me out.

I know I’m not alone. One of my friends told me last week that only surfing the Web can keep him awake when he’s sleep-deprived. And another of my friends shares my predilection for solitaire as a cue to examine what’s wrong internally. And I don’t think we’re the only ones.

While this sort of thing--I like to call it "overtasking" or "cluttertasking"--has been made easier by the portability of laptops, I don’t think distracting ourselves is a new problem. I used to play solitaire the old-fashioned way when the TV was on. And even in the silence with no technology, there are ways of blocking out thoughts we want to avoid. In the olden days, they used to have drugs and alcohol for a similar purpose. :)

If anything, technology seems to be a healthier way of dealing with avoidance. But it’s still something to keep an eye on. If I catch myself doing it, I usually follow it up with some analysis to try to figure out what’s going on. It’s important not just for my emotional health, but also for my creativity. Staring blankly at one screen while vaguely listening to another isn’t exactly the way to stimulate my ideas. Watching TV or movies can help build on my ideas at times. And playing mindless games like solitaire can help me to think through things. But not this particular form of watching TV mixed with solitaire. At least it didn't last night.

So, keeping that in mind, I think I'm going to post this so I can watch the Olympics. I think I'd like to actually watch the downhill skiing tonight.

Is Technology Eroding Our Memories? Part 2

2006-02-10T11:26:00.000-06:00

I’ve been thinking more about to what extent technology builds and erodes our memories, and if it’s a change from before we had the technologies.

It’s true that, now that all my phone numbers are loaded on my cell phone, I remember very few phone numbers anymore. In a dead cell-phone survivalist situation, that wouldn’t be a good thing, necessarily.

And speaking of cell phones, they tend to be poorly used as memory devices at times. Take my friend’s brother, who is terrible with navigating but has to travel for work a lot, so every time he drives into a new city, he calls a family member to look up the maps and talk him through it. There’s something wrong about that.

So clearly, there’s some sort of erosion going on, as the article claims. But I wonder if it’s all that different from my father’s memory (hi dad!). He’s been claiming to have a terrible memory for years, but you ask him who was pitching in the 1981 Cubs game he attended and he’ll tell you exactly what happened during the game.

The point is that that we’ve always (some more than others) specialized in the kind of knowledge we remember. We’ve always had a huge body of knowledge out there that wasn’t in our heads, and we’ve always chosen what we want to retain.

I’m not entirely sure whether in general the amount of stuff we know in our heads has gotten smaller or not. What seems clear is that there’s a lot more information out there from which to pick and choose. Whether or not our memories have gotten worse, it could easily seem like they have in proportion to the body of information that’s out there. And what we remember has certainly changed in some ways.

Is Technology Eroding our Memories? Part 1

2006-02-09T09:34:00.000-06:00

This is the Google Side of Your Brain: This article, which is from a couple of months ago on USAToday, contains some fascinating comments about how Google may be taking the place of our memories. Instead of remembering facts, when we have Google, we can just look it up.

In some senses, this is probably true in a growing segment of the population. But I don’t think the Internet is necessarily turning us all into dolts either. I and many other people use the Internet to expand our memorized knowledge on a regular basis.

Case in point: regular emails and RSS feeds that help us learn new things on an ongoing basis. Bookmarked sites that we check regularly to see what’s going on in a particular area of the world. These sorts of devices help us to actively expand our knowledge in a way we’ve chosen to have our knowledge expanded. They help our memories to get an ongoing sense of what’s going on in a particular area.

For instance, I know I’m bad about ignoring the news of the world, so if I didn’t get email news to let me know what’s going on in various parts of the world, I’d never be aware of what was going on. I still ignore the emails at times, but I remember more of what goes on in the world because I’m getting the emails. My memory might not be exact about what the articles said because I can mostly find them again through a search, but that doesn’t mean my knowledge and memory haven’t been slowly built by them.

Same goes for the poem a day I get from Minnesota Public Radio’s Writer’s Almanac. Because a poem a day appears in my inbox, I gradually get a sense of modern poetry I may not otherwise get around to seeking out. I remember the poems I like, and others I just absorb. Mostly I just bask in them, but somehow I remember bits of the ones I like and, since the poems are chosen well, I, over time, expand my knowledge of poetry as a whole.

There are lots of other examples, but my point is that the Internet can cut two ways when it comes to our memories—it can erode them, but it can also help us build them.

Text messaging and relationships

2006-01-30T08:25:00.000-06:00

Can Love Blossom in a Text Message?: I've never gotten into text messaging on my cell phone--i think it's enough of a pain to enter names into my address book via a cell phone keypad, much less writing whole messages with it. But lots of people text extensively, and this article from USA Today gets into an interesting area: how texting is being used within romantic relationships. Since its brevity allows avoidance of "awkward explanations," some people are even using it to break up with people. Seems that people can find new ways to be tasteless whatever the technology.

Technology was made for man...

2006-01-28T11:04:00.000-06:00

“But to return to the future…If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative… In this community…science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.”

--Aldous Huxley, Foreword to HarperPerennial edition of Brave New World, ix.

Amen. I think life will be more okay if we can keep that in mind. So many people act as though technology itself will either completely save or ruin our lives, but it’s a tool. To be used as a tool. And if we can avoid the trap of letting it own us, learn how to use it responsibly, life will be better.

Like many tools and possessions, it’s good to hold it loosely. To do things without it from time to time to appreciate it. Like alcohol, if we need it around us all the time it can get unhealthy.

I can turn on my TV and choose from 30 choices. I have the means of instant communication. I can write something up in Word and get my thoughts down quickly. Then I can immediately publish it in a blog. I can carry my music with me. These are good things.

But sometimes it’s good to slow down. To appreciate the things of life without technology. To turn off the iPod and the TV to listen to the silence. To write a poem or a story or an essay or a letter or novel in longhand. To spend time sitting face to face with a friend, chatting. To go for a walk by a river and stare at how slow it moves. To read a book and think about what it means before moving on to the next one.

It’s good to have balance. To learn to use technology well and to appreciate it. But also, even if in short bursts, to learn to do without it, so as to appreciate the non-technological things of life. It’s a lesson I am thankful I learned awhile ago.

I love my iPod and my DVD player and my computer and its programs. I love the ease of researching things on the Internet and IMing and emailing my friends. But I also make a point to make times when I purposely do things the non-technical way. To become a bit less efficient to gain other benefits. One could hike up a mountain virtually, I suppose, but I’d rather feel the physical work of it.

If I didn’t have those non-technological tasks, my life would be less real somehow. And less sane. After all, one beauty and potential curse of technology is how quickly it moves. How all-powerful and super-productive and involved in things it can make us feel. It’s good to realize the limitations of that from time to time.

Word Has Made Me a Bad Typist

2005-10-12T10:10:00.000-06:00

Back when I was a freshman in high school, I dutifully took the required typing class. I remember those timed tests, with the counting of errors spelling out your grade at the end. And while I was never a stellar sixty-words-per-minute error-free typist, I became a pretty solid 40-words-per-minute typist with only one or two errors. I did okay.

It was only in the last month or so that I noticed those days are long gone. Somehow, without really thinking about it, I’d cherished this vision that I was still a pretty doggone decent typist. That I was reasonably fast and low on errors. But thanks to this new word-processing program I’ve been using, that illusion has been taken away.

I’ve become a terrible typist. And I blame it all on Word.

You see, this new program I’ve been using has some pretty slick multi-document organizational tools, but it doesn’t have all the bloated auto-correct features of Word. It underlines misspelled words, but it doesn’t correct them as you type.

It wasn’t until auto-correct was taken away from me that I realized how much of a crutch it’s become for me. When you get in the habit of typing words wrong (i.e., “teh” instead of “the”), and you’re typing in Word, you don’t even notice that you’re doing it, because the computer fixes it for you right away. My fingers have been trained to be lazy. Now that I’m trying to use a program that doesn’t do it, I’m annoyed at how flabby my typing skills have become.

Now, maybe it’s true that error-free typing isn’t something I should care about. Maybe it’s true that auto-correct helps me focus on the sense of what I’m writing rather than the mechanics of it. Maybe that’s a good thing. And in general I don’t mind being helped by technology—I think in many ways it does help us in good ways. But it still bothers me that I didn’t even notice how quietly my typing skills have gone away. And so I’m glad that I’m working in a word processing program that allows me to rebuild those skills a bit.

Confessions of an Electronic Organization Junkie

2005-09-22T14:27:00.000-06:00

I’ve only recently moved from the world of cubicles back into the halls of academia, and in the process, I’ve discovered how comfortable I’ve become with using technology to organize my life in the last few years.

I knew, of course, from the fabled paper-crowded state of my cubicle that while I could find out most things electronically in a few seconds, I was getting worse and worse at filing printed matter. And I knew that while I’d always failed at keeping track of my schedule in a paper-bound day-planner, I had become completely comfortable with using Outlook to keep track of my meetings. I knew that email and IM had become normal ways to communicate. And I was still awed by the program I’d recently found to transfer to-do lists and other notes to my iPod, even though it didn’t work quite perfectly.

It made sense—after all, my job for the last five years has been to organize web content. And for the last two years, I’d been studying usability of electronic interfaces. During those periods, I clearly had lots of opportunity to find the advantages of electronic organization methods as well as their limitations. And to figure out which ones worked for me and which didn’t.

But until I went back to school as a graduate student and looked around for ways to organize my student life more efficiently than I’d done as an undergraduate, I didn’t realize how much I’d learned to appreciate technology as a means to that end. Although there are lots of laptops on campus and an impressive intranet system, I’m surprised at how many standard 3-hole-punched notebooks, folders, and overheads I’ve seen in classes. What a culture shock for one coming from the world hailing the joys of the new technology.

Of course, I was as annoyed as anyone when the university’s intranet was mostly down the first week of classes. But it has a great little calendar function where I can keep track of my meetings, my class times, and my tasks, and that makes me happy. And though I’m doing okay with the paper handouts so far (I even bought folders last week to organize them), I have great joy when there’s an electronic edition.

There are, of course, things it’s better to use paper for, organization-wise (and after all, I write most creative writing drafts on paper). But since I’m not big on taking a lot of time to organize my life and have found some helpful electronic tools, I find myself using those more than the other versions of the tools. And I wonder, in the future, whether that will be the trend, gradual though it may be. I doubt if electronic media will ever replace paper (I really don’t think paper books, for instance, are going away soon), but I wonder in what new unexpected ways paper will shift its place in society in the future. Some things--and some people--will surely always use it, and reject new technologies, or selectively adopt new technologies. And personalities, and people's organizational styles, will always have a certain part in dictating which technologies people adopt. After all, I still refuse to own a palm pilot.

Welcome to "im here"--and reflections on the blog title

2005-09-08T11:53:00.000-06:00

Greetings and welcome to "im here," a blog focusing on how technology affects creativity and communication in the English language. In this blog, I'll explore multiple facets of this topic, from how email, IM, the Web, new software and other new media are changing the way we write and edit and talk to each other in the English language to how technologies affect creative pursuits, particularly writing.

I'll be exploring more in later posts, so I won't get too far into the topic now. But before I go, I'd like to explore the title of the blog. It's "im here," as in either "I'm here" or "I am here." When I started using instant messaging about a year and a half ago, I was fascinated to watch my written communication patterns on that medium change in many cases to a sort of shorthand, dropping punctuation, capitals, and other such important marks that help along the meaning of sentences in more formal written English. Soon I was using phrases such as "r u there?" and "im here" in IMing with friends and colleagues. I wasn't sure what to think about this.

The English major/grammarian/editor in me was appalled. If I--and people in general--started dropping the very conventions by which clear written communication is most easily understood, would that negatively affect our ability to communicate with others? And would we start to assume that we could communicate using these shorthand formats in other media and genres that wouldn't support this sort of thing, spreading widespread confusion and miscommunication across the earth? What about the thirteen-year-olds who couldn't distinguish between styles, genres, and audiences and assumed their school reports could be written this way as well?

On the other hand, the linguistics/communications researcher in me was fascinated by the way my writing was changing in IM. After all, I knew that there are different levels of formality required by different media and different situations, and most media and genres require slightly different writing styles. When you're chatting with someone on IM, it's more like an informal conversation with someone in person than a formal address to an audience--or, in the written genres, than to an article or research paper. Although the other person in the conversation isn't right there to communicate via non-verbals, they are right there to clarify anything the other participant doesn't understand. Because of that, the medium doesn't need quite as many of the conventions of written English, in the same way that a face-to-face conversation among friends can be peppered with "uh"s and sentence fragments, but still is understood by the participants. And all languages are constantly evolving, whether for better or for worse. It's fun to watch them change.

Besides the grammarian and the communications researcher, the creative part of me that loves to play with words was interested in the possibilities in this new way to use words. I knew that taking away the "rules" or at least using them differently can at times allow for creativity to emerge in new ways and places. Although guidelines for language usage and style are valuable and important in many situations for precise communication to an audience, anyone working in the English field for long realizes that there are strong disagreements among authorities about the most basic building blocks of grammar and style. As a creative writer/fan of word play, I was quick to realize that some fascinating ambiguities in language arise when you write in shorthand, and ambiguities are the playground of the poet. Word enthusiasts can spend enjoyable hours reflecting on the various meanings of "im here"--how it can mean "I'm here," "I am here," and/or "IM here" (as in the acronym for instant messaging).

In the end, although I determined to keep it the style strictly to IM unless there was a good reason to do otherwise, I decided to go on using shorthand when IMing with most people that are used to the medium. The practical side of me realized that to keep the conversation flowing, less keystrokes is better as far as IM is concerned. The other person nearly always asks for clarification if they don't understand what I'm saying. And I have a lot of fun watching for ambiguities and places where the misunderstandings do and don't occur in my IM conversations.

At the same time, I'm always watching for ways this new style of writing will affect other genres and media.

So, on this blog, "I'm here" (punctuation and capitalization included) with my reflections about these and related matters. But on IM, I'll say instead that "im here."

I'd love to hear your comments on my reflections, so keep in touch.