Connections Between Scholarship and the Web

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

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

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

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

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"

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

"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.)