Being Witnessed

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

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?

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...

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

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

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

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.